


The Ineffable and Terrible

by ncfan



Category: Herbert West - Reanimator - H. P. Lovecraft, LOVECRAFT H. P. - Works
Genre: Domestic Fluff, Established Relationship, Gen, Kingsport is great because it's so thinly sketched that I can do nearly whatever with it, M/M, Slice of Life
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-14
Updated: 2019-07-14
Packaged: 2020-06-28 11:34:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 23,999
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19811458
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ncfan/pseuds/ncfan
Summary: A shopping trip to Kingsport goes decidedly poorly, in more ways than one. In the aftermath, Herbert and Stephen find themselves reevaluating some things.





	1. Chapter One

**Author's Note:**

> My original vision of this story was a light-hearted oneshot where Stephen had a summer love affair with amateur photography. It, uh, didn't stay that way. Obviously.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> My original vision of this story was a light-hearted oneshot where Stephen had a summer love affair with amateur photography. It, uh, didn't stay that way. Obviously.

Stephen had not had much opportunity to travel and really familiarize himself with the full contents of the Miskatonic Valley. As a student, he had not been overly burdened with spending money. What spare money he had was spent primarily on food and drink, and his primary means of entertaining himself when at loose ends, back in the days when his loose ends had truly been _loose_ , was walking up and down the banks of the cold, inhospitable river, in defiance of every last bit of advice given to him by any native of the place who knew what he was doing with his spare time.

He had managed to walk well and truly out of the city limits on a couple of occasions. Both times, the trees closed in so fast and so dark that he could easily imagine there was nothing at his back but more of the same. There were few roads that led in or out of Arkham, and even fewer footpaths through the forest. It was so easy to get lost. All the trees managed to look the same; even a slender pine and a broad, squat beech looked the same when they stood next to each other in one of the forests outside of Arkham. It was so easy to get lost, and believe that you had slipped into a world where there was nothing but this forest where the canopy seemed not to let in as much sunlight as it should, where you were always seeing movement out of the corner of your eyes and never finding anything when your head snapped to the direction where that movement had come from.

It was not a pleasant feeling. He had found the Chapman farmhouse that way, but it almost hadn’t been worth the feeling of being caged by the tall, dense-canopied trees, and the amount of time it had taken for him to find his way back to town again.

Of course, Stephen was to understand that many of the little towns and villages in the valley had approximately nothing to recommend themselves to the average traveler. Dig more than about an inch into the soil, and he could unearth a trove of rumors and whispers that somehow managed to tell him much, and yet nothing at all.

There was nothing to Dunwich but a cluster of inbred farmers desperately suspicious of outsiders. Stephen’s roommate his first year at the university had regaled him with tales of odd pagan rituals conducted outside of the village—something about an altar on a hill in the mountains. He honestly suspected his roommate had either heavily embellished or made up whole cloth these stories; it just wasn’t something that gelled at all with the modern world.

(And there was another part of him that thought of life in Arkham. Thought of the strange fires burning in the distance on the night of May Day. Thought about snatches of sounds he heard not only on that night, but on others as well. Thought about how utterly deserted Arkham became at night, and some of the things he had seen during plague times—illness and exhaustion had rendered much of it a haze, and there were times when he was uncertain how much of what he recalled was rooted in the waking world and how much in his dreams, but he had seen things. He… wondered about it, sometimes. You hear things, and then you wish you hadn’t.)

Innsmouth was a pit, was how people described the town, when they were willing to speak of it at all—and while you could definitely find someone willing to speak of Dunwich, if only to make it the butt of a cruel joke, finding people willing to speak freely of Innsmouth was no mean feat. Though it was as ancient a place as any in the valley, barring Bolton (which could not be more than about thirty years old), half of the maps Stephen had looked at didn’t feature Innsmouth’s location, and those that did gave conflicting information as to its exact size and location. The whispers surrounding Innsmouth were… It wouldn’t have stopped Stephen from visiting, if only he could have found someone willing to accompany him. The one time had had put the idea to Herbert, Herbert looked at him like he had grown a second head.

 _“Is that_ really _the place you want to be found in after dark?”_

Stephen had tried to ask him what he meant, and Herbert barely spoke for the rest of the evening. The quality of his silence was enough to put Stephen off the idea of making the trip up to Innsmouth.

However, life in such a small, poorly-stocked town as Bolton did carry with it a certain necessity for travel. Such hadn’t really occurred to Stephen before he moved here, and in retrospect, he probably should have thought about it a little more. It would have done better to have set out a plan at the start, instead of scrambling the first time travel became a necessity.

Today, disinfectant was the source of the trouble. They were running low on the disinfectant they used to wipe down their tools, and would be completely out by the end of the month. There were more gentle disinfectants within reach in Bolton, but Herbert insisted they use the strongest available to the general public, and given how well using gentler disinfectants had played out for them the summer before, Stephen wasn’t going to argue.

Well, Bolton was fresh out of this particular disinfectant. The general store didn’t have any, and neither did the pharmacy. _That_ by itself raised questions, at least to Stephen; there were other doctors in town, but not many, not enough to completely exhaust the supply of this disinfectant. In other places he might have put it down to laziness, but the proprietor of the general store, Urquhart, was such a stickler for never having empty shelves if he could help it that the absence was something that stuck out in Stephen’s mind.

Placing a few calls from the general store did not fill either of them with optimism regarding the state of affairs in Arkham. One call, two calls, three calls, four, and then Urquhart grew annoyed and banned from using the telephone in his store for the rest of the month. The very tense conversation Herbert had had the last time he made a call, steadily increasing in volume (Stephen would later learn that Herbert had contacted the medical school—so yes, that phone call ended about as well as could be expected) might have had something to do with it, but Urquhart had always regarded himself of king of all he surveyed, anyhow.

Elsa Watson at the pharmacy had let Herbert behind the counter to use their telephone. Just Herbert, she made very clear, leaving Stephen to sit out in the waiting area, watching as townsfolk filtered in and out, some of whom he recognized as his own patients. Stephen learned little from this, except for which of his patients were brazen enough to both forge his signature to try to obtain more pain medication, _and_ do it when he was sitting right in front of him.

Well, he had learned two things. Laudanum was the painkiller of choice for the people who tried to obtain it by forgery. He would really have thought it would be heroin.

Stephen longed for the days when he would be able to dismiss a delinquent patient without risking the whole patient list.

Eventually, Herbert emerged from the back of the pharmacy. He said nothing as they left the store, but the look on his face told all.

“We can try Boston. Boston’s certain to have it.”

Herbert shook his head sharply. “I don’t want to try Boston yet—that, only as a last resort.”

And _that_ was a conversation they were going to have to have eventually, but not today.

Herbert paused, pursed his lips, and asked, “Have you ever been to Kingsport?”

-0-0-0-

Fortunately, they hadn’t needed to stay in Arkham long; the steam bus had been so late getting them there that they’d nearly had to run to reach the train station on time. Stephen had only been back to Arkham a handful of times since moving away, and every time he went, the city felt just as it had when he lad left it, like a graveyard interspersed with houses that served also as mausoleums where the living just happened to be staying for a while.

They had stopped counting the dead around the time Stephen had stopped trying to remember what the typical death toll from an outbreak of typhoid in a settlement of Arkham’s size was. Arkham had lost much, had lost many, but he walked its streets and it was as walking through a ghost town, a place nearly completely emptied out. The streets were largely deserted even at noontime, and even at noontime on a cloudless day, the shadows cut across the ground like streams of clinging tar. The residents left behind darted furtively like mice in a field, who feared the gaze of the hawk far ahead. Surely, the toll had not been this bad. Had it?

Once they boarded the half-empty train, the oppressive atmosphere of Arkham lessened, and Stephen felt cheerful enough to ask, “So, what’s in Kingsport?”

As the train lurched into life with a deafening screech, the car (they had a compartment to themselves; even accounting for the drastically depopulated town they had passed through to get here, Stephen could scarcely believe their luck) was flooded with hot, blinding sunlight. Herbert flinched and screwed his eyes shut against the light for a few moments. When he finally opened them again, he shrugged his shoulders. “Not very much. There’s a department store, a girl’s school, a boy’s school, other shops. I can’t remember if the public library is still open; their collection may have been absorbed into Arkham’s.”

“Is it a den of witches like Dunwich’s supposed to be?” Through glass windows, crowned with white-gold sunlight, the dark, dense forests surrounding Arkham looked picturesque rather than foreboding, like the illustrations Stephen had seen of New England from before the arrival of the first colonists. “You wouldn’t believe some of the stories Palmer used to tell me when we were in the dormitory together.”

A faint sound, half a huff, half the ghost of a laugh, escaped Herbert’s mouth. “Oh, I’d believe it. I’ve heard all the stories, and I—“ here, he fixed Stephen in a somewhat admonishing stare “—can name any number of reasons for why you should avoid Dunwich, but Kingsport is an entirely different animal.” He turned his face to the window. “It’s a little smaller than Arkham. Pretty little seaside town that lives or dies by the summer tourists.”

“Know it well?”

“Oh, yes.” There was no smile on Herbert’s face, no softening of nostalgia as he explained, “I went to school there, for a time.”

“That’s good.” And the relief that washed over Stephen had been unexpected, but after some thought, it made sense. The town would be a known quantity, at least. “You know where we’re going, then?”

“Hmm?” Herbert’s eyes kept straying to the window, his mouth pressed into a barely visible pink line. “Yes… I suppose I do.”

He sat there, so still and silent, hands taut in his lap as he stared at the scenery passing him by, and Stephen felt concern come over him like mist off of the river in winter, banishing his relief like mist in spring to be burned off by the sun. But he didn’t really know what to _say_. Kingsport was a known quantity to Herbert, and the prospect of visiting even just to run a short errand provoked this fraught silence. It was a quantity utterly unknown to Stephen, and he could not think of anything to say that he knew would make the situation better.

And they were alone in the compartment, but they weren’t alone in the _car_. They were being watched. (There were no windows on the compartment doors, or any on the walls that separated their compartment from the others.) They were being watched. Herbert would be even more vehement about it than Stephen was. They’d be home again eventually. It could wait.

Stephen settled down for the journey.

The rail line between Arkham and Kingsport wasn’t a particularly long one, for all that they couldn’t go straight there, instead turning northwest out of town before heading south again. It had to take a few winding turns to avoid those stretches of marsh and estuary where the ground was too soft to safely lay down tracks, but still, Stephen didn’t think these digressions added more than about fifteen minutes to the journey. Even for such a short train ride, the scenery changed drastically.

Within ten minutes, the dense forests fell away to reveal fields of lush green grass grown long and ragged—farmer’s fields left abandoned. Stephen sometimes thought he could see movement within the grass, but it was always something elusive, something he couldn’t seem to lay eyes on. A cat, most likely, or maybe a fox. Not a child; it couldn’t have been a child. The little houses at the back of the fields, far back from the tracks, stood dark, their chimneys crumbling and their roofs falling in.

The further they got from Arkham, the brighter a blue the sky became. Perhaps it was just from the smoke, but the skies over Arkham always carried a faint gray cast, even on the most cloudless day. Out here, it was a pure, crystalline blue, the sort of blue you could fall into and never climb out of again. The train passed by the winding waters of the Miskatonic River as it surged down the last few miles to the sea, and the gray snake of Arkham was transformed to a sparkling blue ribbon. As quickly as the land had changed from forest to fields, the land changed from fields to estuaries, all vivid green grass and snowy white birds and shimmering pools. The colors just got brighter, and brighter.

And brighter. Stephen couldn’t remember the last time he had seen nature painted in colors so bright.

Kingsport, upon their approach, was easily spotted. Certain oddities seemed simply to be a fact of life in the Miskatonic Valley, and here was another one: the local geography around Kingsport.

The river behaved much as Stephen expected. The Miskatonic’s mouth broke into several smaller streams upon meeting with the churning waters of the Atlantic, partitioned by long strips of shoals whose rocky walls glinted wetly in the sun. By the time river and ocean met, there barely seemed to be any flow of water at all.

The hill, or, rather, the hill that seemed to be vying for status as a small mountain, was not as expected.

Rising up out of the flat earth was a steep, ragged hill of massive size, roughly triangular in shape, that fell off in a sheer cliff overlooking the ocean. It was not a smooth incline from the base to the summit. Even from a distance, Stephen could spot crags and outcroppings and the deep shadows of ravines. The hill rolled and it rippled, gently at the base though it became steeper the higher the elevation, almost terrace-like in formation, and it was on these lower terraces that Kingsport could be found.

Stephen would have to get closer to be certain, but the architecture of Kingsport was on much the same lines as what was found in Arkham. A great many gambrel roofs (though a few conical roofs could be spotted as well), and the few white-washed steeples (so clean, so very clean, so very, blindingly white) that rose above the rooftops did so almost furtively, as if their height was an offense against someone who tended to respond to such offenses with the impulse to destroy the source and had the size and the strength to act on that impulse immediately. Lanes of bright red brick climbed up the grass-terraced (naturally?) slopes of the hill, connecting the different sections of the town like arteries of stone.

A little glint of gray caught Stephen’s eye, and he looked further up the hill. There was, curiously, what looked like a small house perched precariously at the very summit, overlooking the vast blue sea. Stephen spared a moment to wonder why anyone would build a house up _there_ , before other things drew his attention away.

The closer the train came to its destination, the brighter in color the town appeared to Stephen’s eye. By the time the train drew to its juddering halt, Stephen looked upon a town drenched in color so over-saturated that he could feel a faint jolt of pain near the top of his head every time he opened his eyes after blinking.

For a moment, Stephen felt a spike of unease to match the little jolts of pain. But after the moment passed, he dismissed it. He’d just come from Arkham, which on especially bad days appeared to exist entirely in varying shades of gray, and frankly, Bolton wasn’t much better. They were both dreary towns in terms of palette. He’d just grown unaccustomed to places that were actually willing to make proper use of color.

(Later, he would wish he’d listened to unease. He would have thought he had learned that lesson already.)


	2. Chapter Two

“We have a-ways to go before we get to the shop I’m looking for,” Herbert said as they stood, adjusting the lapels of his jacket and fiddling discontentedly with his tie. “And we’ve a few hours before the train heads back to Arkham, so please don’t wander off.”

“Do I look like a schoolboy to you?” Stephen retorted, if with rather less heat than he could have mustered. Outside the compartment, he could hear the faint murmur of voices and rustling cloth as the other passengers headed for the exit.

Herbert looked him over slowly, his lip twitching slightly as if fighting a smile. “No fear of that.”

Stephen wasn’t certain whether to blush or to check and make sure that no one had replaced Herbert with a doppelgänger while his back was turned. Not unwelcome, but certainly not common, either. “Well, now I _am_ concerned,” he said dryly, “if you’re feeling rattled enough to _flirt_.”

Color flooded into Herbert’s face as they spilled out into the narrow passage leading to the exit. It looked as if they were the last to leave. “I don’t mean to be inappropriate,” and his voice was so brittle that Stephen half-expected it to break into shards. “I don’t believe I was implying anything.”

And there was the rub. Stephen had had nearly a year to learn a single truth: that Herbert had somehow managed to spend his whole life without ever learning how to flirt. When he did it, the attempts were infrequent, and Stephen could never tell if they were purposeful or not. (He wasn’t complaining, but the ambiguity could be a little off-putting.) This… This was probably not purposeful. Probably. “Please just tell me what has you worried,” he supplied helpfully. “Whatever it is, I would like to help.” _Would like to able to protect you, if need be, but I need to know more to know how._

Slowly, the color went down in Herbert’s face. “I’m not saying that we’ll be trapped here forever if we eat the food.”

Stephen frowned. _That_ was a very specific reference.

“The summer tourists stay here for days at a time,” Herbert was saying, “and they always seem able to make it back outside again.” He frowned suddenly. “Well, most of the time.”

“ _Most_ of the time?” Words came out more loudly than Stephen had intended, and at the tense look Herbert shot his way, he grimaced and lowered his voice. “Sorry. But what do you mean, ‘ _most_ of the time?’”

“It’s the ocean.” His voice was so even. “People decide to go swimming. People overestimate their prowess. People ignore the warnings. People drown.”

“How many?” He had never tried to learn anything about the drowning death statistics for seaside towns. It wasn’t something he’d ever thought he’d _need_.

“Usually one or two during high tourist times. There were four the summer I was living here.” Herbert glanced up at his face, before looking away again. “And tourists often make the mistake of assuming that their temporary home is just as safe and peaceful as their permanent one.”

That much, Stephen had no trouble grasping. His own hometown was a popular destination for visitors and sightseers who were not as watchful of their belongings—or themselves—as they should have been.

There came a little shrug of Herbert’s narrow shoulders. “There are those who are not as mindful as they ought to be when they venture out at night.” This time, when he looked up at Stephen’s face, he did not look away again. “You and I will not still be here when night falls. Still, don’t wander off. It’s…” Something flashed in his pale eyes, something Stephen couldn’t quite place. “It’s easy to get lost.”

Stephen nodded, though he didn’t see how it would be particularly easy to get lost. He’d gotten a good look at Kingsport’s layout while the train sped towards it. It didn’t look like a town big enough to get lost in, not really.

(That was his second mistake: forgetting how easy it had been to get lost in the forests around Arkham.)

When on the train, it had been possible to think that maybe, just maybe, the sheer cacophony of over-saturated color outside had been the effect of viewing a town through a thick window of slightly warped glass on a sunny day. As far as possibilities went, it was certainly remote, but it was possible. Possible, and, Stephen learned to his regret immediately upon disembarking the train, incorrect.

There came another jolt of pain, stronger and considerably more sustained than the little ones that had assailed Stephen when he had looked out the train window. Oh, God, it wasn’t as if he had ever been that imaginative with colors, especially not when using them to describe things, but now he was finding himself without much choice. Or any choice at all, really.

Nothing could be red when it could be scarlet. Nothing could be green when it could be a piercing, acid green instead. The sky couldn’t possibly be blue when it could be a nauseous, shimmering haze of azure. Whitewashed buildings couldn’t be white when they could appear as the pulsing of an incandescent light bulb. Whenever Stephen closed his eyes, he saw bursts of color dancing behind his eyelids, as if he had been staring at the sun.

“Stephen?”

When, with some reluctance, Stephen finally managed to focus his gaze upon Herbert, the effect was disconcerting. The ivory of his skin was bleached to bright white bone, the slate gray of his jacket and trousers darkened to black. Light flashed off the lenses of his spectacles, so bright that Stephen felt another jolt of pain lance his skull.

After quite a lot of rapid blinking, his surroundings began to come into somewhat more bearable focus (Though he would never find it comfortable, never have a moment outside in Kingsport when he didn’t feel at least a faint throbbing just behind his eyes).

Herbert looked at him with a frown etched into his face. He did not seem particularly surprised by Stephen’s reaction; there was no trace of impatience in his face. “Come along,” he said, nodding his head towards the street that stretched before them, paved with bricks that looked as if they’d been baked in bright blood.

As they began to make their way through the sun-drenched lanes of Kingsport, Stephen began trying to put his discomfort behind him, and some of his natural curiosity at being in a new place returned to him.

It had been much the same when he was fresh-arrived in Arkham, a new student at the university who had yet to hear enough of the whispers and see enough of the shadows to understand why he _shouldn’t_ explore the town that was his residence for the better part of the year. While he had still possessed the gift of ignorance, Stephen had gotten to know the streets of Arkham (or, at least, the face the streets of Arkham tried to present to the world) reasonably well. He knew where all the restaurants and shops were, knew which residential streets housed the great and good and which ones housed the down and out, knew which of the few roads out of town lead to which towns elsewhere in the valley, and knew exactly where the road to Innsmouth began to turn to fly-ridden salt marsh. He hadn’t felt as if he had settled in until he knew where everything was.

Stephen might well never return to Kingsport. If it turned out the town painted itself in colors fit to pierce his skull even on days when the sky was choked with charcoal-gray storm clouds, he didn’t like the idea of returning at all. Not for extended periods of time, and certainly not for an overnight stay. But this was somewhere new, and he’d had precious little of that since graduating from the university. So he drank in the sights.

The sky, when he got over how it felt like something to fall into, rather than something like the backdrop of the world, was remarkably clean. Herbert couldn’t have been far off the mark when he said that Kingsport derived most of its revenue from tourism. The skies over Bolton featured twin plumes of white smoke rising up from the textile mill six days a week, and on the seventh, you could still see the traces of that smoke cloud hanging over the town proper, lingering the way cigarette smoke would linger in an enclosed room after the smoker had put their cigarettes out in the ashtray. Arkham had that faint, shimmering cigarette cloud-like haze seven days a week.

But the sky over Kingsport was clear. There were no clouds as far as the eye could see, and Stephen could make out no sign of the smoke belched out by factories or mills. There must not have been either anywhere within walking distance of the town.

Neither was there any smell of smoke. The wind was high—a gift of the ocean so nearby that it was difficult for Stephen to hear himself think over its roars—and the only smell in the air was the smell of salt, as tons upon tons of water crashed into the beach off to his east.

What they passed through must have been a commercial district; all of the buildings on both sides of the street were emblazoned, either above or below the deep green canvas awnings, with either signs or, in the case of such as lawyer’s offices, the names of those men in charge within. Flashes of gold were continually catching Stephen’s eye; _all_ of the letters for each of the signs were done up in bright, highly-polished metallic gold letters. Stephen frowned as he realized that; he was used to a bit more variety in shop signs than all that.

As they passed a corner store (‘HILLMAN’S DRUGSTORE’ in letters that winked and sparkled down at them), there was a boy calling out ‘newspaper!’ over and over again. Stephen couldn’t remember hearing him before they turned the street corner (he had the ocean to thank, he supposed), but there he was with a stack of newspapers bound with heavy twine at his feet, holding one aloft and shouting ‘newspaper, newspaper, _Kingsport Times_ , newspaper!’ like a little parrot. He had a wide smile affixed to his face that never faltered when he spoke, didn’t falter even when a particularly powerful gust of wind threatened to carry off the entire stack and he had to lunge to keep it from toppling over.

Stephen had loose change in his pocket. He could well remember being a little boy forever short on pocket money. If nothing else, it would give him something to read on the train ride back to Arkham.

But before he could take more than two steps in the direction of the boy, Herbert’s hand clamped down, white-knuckled, over his forearm.

“What?” he asked, just a little indignantly. “Does walking—“ he gestured towards the boy, who seemed completely oblivious to their exchange “—over there qualify as ‘wandering off?’”

Herbert hesitated, his eyes searching Stephen’s face. In the light that shone down on Kingsport, his eyes were turned from their normal pale blue to a cyan so brilliant that even the sky above was slightly dull in comparison. Among other things, it made it hard to guess what sort of expression might be found in those eyes. Then, Herbert tilted his head ever so slightly, an expression stealing over his mouth that wasn’t quite a grimace, wasn’t quite a smirk.

“The _Kingsport Times_ is a gossip rag,” he said tartly, and the tartness in his voice was so barely audibly forced that Stephen almost failed to pick up on it. “I wouldn’t use it for packaging; you certainly shouldn’t waste your money on it. It’s not that much further to the shop; just follow me.”

Herbert started on again at a pace just short of a dash, shoulders stiff and spine ramrod-straight. Stephen paused where he was, frowning at Herbert’s retreating back, until finally Herbert realized he wasn’t being followed and looked over his shoulder to beckon him onwards.

As they headed on towards their destination, ‘newspaper, newspaper!’ rang out in the air behind them, until it was swallowed up all at once by the roar of the tide.

-0-0-0-

It was three blocks down and two blocks over, down streets and lanes rarely marked with signs and past pedestrians, many of whom smiled brightly as they went about their business, where Herbert stopped outside of a storefront about halfway down the street they were presently on. ‘ODDS AND ENDS’ was emblazoned in flashing gold letters over a narrow green awning. Stephen didn’t know what he thought less promising, that name, or how small the space apparently was compared to the ones it was wedged between, but Herbert strode inside with all the confidence of a man who had clearly arrived at his destination. Stephen saw nothing for it but to follow him inside. The sun was higher in the sky, now, and blazing; he had no intention of waiting outside in it, alone.

The bell that rang as they walked through the door was jarringly loud, a discordant clang where Stephen was expecting a musical tinkle.

The interior of the shop was… Stephen stopped dead just inside the doorway, staring at his surroundings in disbelief.

It was as if someone had knocked down the walls separating this shop from the ones to its immediate left and right, for within the narrow front the shop flared out more than Stephen would have ever expected. The back wall was lined with shelves, only breaking for a door that Stephen could only assume led to a stockroom. The counter keeping the average shopper from these shelves was topped with polished, shining wood that smelled faintly of alcohol (though it was nearly overpowered by the cloying fragrance of what Stephen thought was tuberose), had for a body a number of glass display cases. More free-standing display cases dotted the floor, glass gleaming in the light of the gas lamps hung on the walls. There were no chairs, no sign of an owner or shop assistant; the wall was decorated with wallpaper rich and ornate, fading and peeling at the point where the wall met the ceiling. There were various white scuff marks on the floor from where the display cases had been moved from time to time, and the items contained in those display cases were of such variety that Stephen could no longer fault the name of the shop. There was nothing else you _could_ have called it.

“He may be out,” Herbert was muttering, looking around the place as if he expected to see the proprietor pop up from behind one of the free-standing display cases. “Or maybe he’s—“

But then, the door into the back swung open, and they both snapped to attention, Stephen feeling absurdly as though he’d just been caught trespassing.

The room behind the door was utterly dark, but the man it had produced seemed not at all affected. He was a man of middle years, neatly dressed, brown hair taking on a touch of gray and the smile that split his mouth untouched by laugh lines. There was something familiar about the smile, something Stephen couldn’t quite place. He wasn’t given the time sufficient to try to piece it together, for the man was speaking.

“Good morning, gentlemen,” the man said, with a jocular nod. “Clarence Bailey, at your service.”

Herbert stepped forward quickly, leaving Stephen with little else to do but look around the shop as they spoke. Even within the walls of the shop, the wind and the ocean made themselves heard, enough that the voices of the two men, tones soft, were rendered to uninterpretable murmurs once Stephen no longer stood at their side.

There seemed to be absolutely no rhyme or reason as to what was displayed in which display case. Women’s gloves of silk, satin, and leather were set out next to fish hooks. A jar of pickled eggs stood alongside two rolls of white bandages and a child’s straw hat. One of the display cases had an empty space, with just a card reading in slanted, slightly sloppy handwriting, ‘ _To see the books, enquire with C. Bailey.’_ Stephen thought that rather odd—clearly, there was no concern about items that didn’t match with the rest—but then he remembered the restricted section of the university’s library. Remembered the rumors, remembered how the very idea of access into that space had been both coveted and dreaded, and put that line of thought to bed. He did _not_ want to know.

As he was peering at a box full of old eyeglasses, something caught Stephen’s eye.

It gave him a nasty jolt when he first saw it. He looked to a display case sitting in shadow near the back, and saw what looked for all the world like a row of human faces staring back at him. Herbert and Bailey must have been truly absorbed in conversation, for neither of them noticed when he jumped slightly, and he was allowed to catch his breath in peace.

Porcelain masks. That was what they revealed themselves to be, when he drew closer to the case. There was, on the top shelf of this case, a row of porcelain masks, incredibly realistic, made to look like the faces of adult men and women.

Stephen allowed himself a moment of wonder as he inspected them more closely. Whoever had fashioned the masks possessed a level of artistic talent far beyond anything he had ever seen in an art museum. Even the most detailed death masks he had seen in a temporary exhibit in the Art Institute of Chicago as a boy couldn’t compare in terms of detail or life-likeness. These looked like they could spring from the case at any moment, if only they had bodies to be attached to.

There was something a little odd about them, though. Just based on their size, Stephen would have assumed they were meant to be worn, maybe at parties or during parades. But there were no holes for the wearers’ eyes. Instead, there were eyes painted on, just as incredibly lifelike as the rest of the masks—one had heterochromia, with an eye of brown and an eye of dull, grayish-blue. The only hole anywhere on any of the masks was between the lips, which were parted in uniform smiles.

If anyone knew just what they were for, it would be the man trying to sell them. Stephen had just opened his mouth to ask Bailey about the masks, however, when the murmurs coming from the other occupants again reached a volume he could easily understand.

“Well, if you don’t have what I’m looking for, then we have nothing further to discuss.”

Herbert’s tone was… Stephen couldn’t remember when exactly it had been that he had become so attuned to Herbert’s tones of voice. It was maybe sometimes around the start of the second year of their studies at the medical school, several months after Herbert had accepted that Stephen wasn’t feigning interest in his studies regarding the mechanisms of death as some sort of prank. This was before they had become the more-or-less constant companions they were by the time of their graduation, but they were spending a fair amount of time in each other’s company, nearly every day. They saw each other for at least a couple of hours nearly every day, and Stephen had been fascinated by the subtle inflections and tremors in Herbert’s voice, by the way the cadence and rhythm of his voice would shift depending on his mood.

He knew that tone. He didn’t hear it very often, but he knew it when he heard it, and its sounding here and now had Stephen looking sharply to Bailey, whose smile was unwavering in spite of the retreat of a potential customer. What it had him doing next was following closely after Herbert as he headed for the door.

“You’re sure you won’t buy anything?” Bailey called to them as they neared the door. There was not the slightest trace of apology in his voice, either for not being able to be of service, or for whatever else it had been that had happened during their conversation, for there _must_ be something. Instead, it was just the same jocular cheer with which he had greeted them, as if his voice knew only one tone. “I have so much to sell, gentlemen; there must be something that you want.”

Stephen fully expected Herbert to exit the door with a scoff. When he stopped dead in his tracks, it was impossible not to take notice.

The air in the shop was very still, and reeked of tuberose, and Stephen watched as Herbert’s back, already habitually straight, went so unforgivingly rigid that it was a wonder his spine did not creak under the strain. Stephen looked at him, concern starting to gnaw at his ribs, but Herbert did not meet his gaze.

Stephen looked just past him, and settled upon something he could use to make this shopkeeper leave them alone.

“Is the camera for sale?” he asked, pointing to the Kodak Brownie (a No. 2, most likely; Stephen couldn’t imagine the man would have an original set out so close to the front window) sitting in a display case to the immediate left of the door.

“Oh, yes, sir. Two dollars.”

At least there wouldn’t be any price-gouging, today. “And do you have film?”

“Wouldn’t dream of selling a camera without film.”

“Great. I’ll take the camera, and five rolls of film.”

Stephen left the shop a few minutes later, his pockets three dollars lighter. Herbert had lingered by the doorway until Stephen was done, silent and unmoving, and Stephen could feel his eyes burning holes into his back the whole time. Bailey’s smile never flickered, and by the time Stephen was leaving, really leaving, he was glad to be out of its presence.

The door swung shut with such a heavy bang that the windowpanes rattled behind them.

“Thank you,” Herbert murmured, his voice barely audible over the wind and the surf.

“Whatever for?”

An explanation, he hoped, would be forthcoming. Concern was still working on his ribs, and once done there it was difficult to say whether it would proceed to his organs or his spine. A quick look told Stephen that the street was deserted on both sides, but there were windows over the rows of shops and while many of those had their curtains drawn shut, not all did. The sun shone too brightly to tell if there were people standing in those windows. Stephen could only stand and look, and wait for a reply.

After a moment, Herbert finally met his eyes. “Bailey’s always been a nuisance,” he said, in tones of acerbic unconcern that rang immediately false. “There have been times when I’ve honestly thought he might chase me down the street. I just wish you didn’t have to empty your pockets to satisfy him.”

“It’s no problem. I actually like cameras.” Stephen took a step forward. “But what—“

Herbert did a half-turn towards the middle of the street, taking his scratched old watch out of his vest pocket as he did so. The silver case flashed, blindingly bright, in the sun as he examined it. “We have another three hours before the train returns to Arkham.” He looked over his shoulder at Stephen, expression so close to unconcerned that it could almost pass for the real thing. “I suppose you’re getting hungry?”

“I… Yes, I am.”

“There’s a restaurant in the department store that you might like. It’s not far—two blocks east, a little downhill, and it gets us out of the sun.” He spoke as if convincing himself. And then, just walked off without another word.

After a moment’s staring at his retreating back, Stephen followed.


	3. Chapter Three

“So, Boston next?”

The department store, Parker’s, was likely one of the most modern establishments in Kingsport. Electric lights glowed at every wall and from every ceiling, encased in stained glass painted in shades of gold and pink and pale orange. The floors of alternating white and black tiles were so highly polished that Stephen could make his face out in them with ease. The benches possessed gleaming steel frames and plush brocaded cushions. The acoustics were _terrible_ , but that at least allowed them to have a conversation with relatively little concern about being overheard.

“I suppose.” Herbert stirred discontentedly at his consommé with his spoon, staring down into the bowl as though he could change the contents to something he found more agreeable by the force of his glare alone. Not that Stephen was certain what that more agreeable ‘something’ would have been. “I’m not at all sure when we’d have _time_.”

They were sitting close to the edge of the restaurant’s ‘territory,’ and a few shoppers passed them by. But these shoppers did not wear huge, unwavering smiles on their faces, and this allowed Stephen to relax a little, though he wasn’t certain as to why. (He should have thought about it more, should have listened to the instincts that fueled unease and thought about it more, instead of brushing it all off until the moment came when it became impossible to do so.)

Stephen tore off a piece of the bread he had been provided and dipped it in his bisque. “One of us could go on our own.” With every mouthful of bisque, either direct from the spoon or slathered on bread, the amount of pepper present seemed to grow more intense. It wasn’t a complaint; it was just that it was growing increasingly difficult to eat it without his eyes watering. “I know my way around Boston, now; I can find what we need there without you guiding me.”

‘Guiding’ might be a generous way of putting it. When they first made a trip to Boston together, back when they were attending school, it had quickly become apparent that Herbert had barely any more experience of Boston than Stephen himself, who had _never_ before visited the city. They had lost their way on multiple occasions, and had ultimately had to find a cheap hotel to stay in after missing the last train of the day heading back towards Arkham. Given what little Stephen had learned of Herbert’s family since then, he would have thought Herbert would have more experience of Boston than all that, but it couldn’t be helped.

“That might be best,” Herbert agreed, nodding, though he still didn’t look especially happy. “If _I_ go, Isabelle will expect me to call on her, especially now that she’s deigned to visit me in Bolton. I’d rather not lose the hours.”

“Isab—Oh, Mrs. Beaumont.” One of Herbert’s cousins (Stephen was to understand he had many). “Is she… Has she mentioned wanting to visit again?”

Herbert raised a quizzical eyebrow. “Did she _seem_ like she wanted to visit again, _any_ time soon?”

Honestly, there could be only one answer. “No.”

There hadn’t been much of a resemblance, not really. She had been tall, just one or two inches shy of Stephen’s height, even without her hat on (That hat being adorned by what was possibly the most impressively lethal-looking jeweled hatpin Stephen had ever seen in his life). She had been black-haired and dark-eyed and dressed like she had stepped out of a fashion plate, or, more likely, _Vogue_ (Herbert might dress neatly, might keep his eye on the changing fashions, but Stephen really suspected it would be easier to pull teeth from his unwilling mouth than it would be to get him to dress in anything that could not at least be termed ‘sober’). The resemblance came out around pale skin and a sharp, delicately pointed nose and the bright, piercing gleam of her eyes.

Stephen thought he had seen some affection for Herbert in her manner, though it was expressed obliquely and Herbert immediately balked when it threatened to become something more tangible than tacit. With Stephen, on the other hand… Well, he didn’t think Mrs. Beaumont had taken to him. Truth be told, he didn’t know what to make of her.

“She was content to keep her distance for years,” Herbert muttered, reaching up to rub at his left shoulder as if he’d pulled a muscle. “I don’t understand why she’s insisting on becoming more involved _now_.”

He’d said the same thing just after she’d left their house for Arkham. He didn’t seem to realize that.

Before Stephen could point that out to him, Herbert turned his gaze to Stephen’s plate, his nose wrinkling slightly as his eyes settled on the mug. “How is…” he waved his hand at the mug of bisque “… _that_?”

“This?” Stephen raised his spoon. “It’s wonderful. Very tasty.” At the bit of a shudder Herbert couldn’t quite manage to hide, Stephen asked, very innocently, “Would you like some?”

This time, there was no attempt to hide the shudder, though Stephen did manage to hide his laugh. “ _No_. I cannot understand how you can eat that; it’s revolting!”

Stephen couldn’t help but allow himself a chuckle, and his smile completely failed to evaporate at the sight of Herbert glaring defensively at him. “I don’t think I’ll ever understand this thing with you and fish—“

“Lobster is not a fish.”

“It’s _crab_ , and my point stands. You grew up so close to the sea; I can understand not being absolutely crazy for it, but I would have thought you’d at least be able to _tolerate_ fish, shellfish, things that live in water in general.” Herbert was starting to look at him with the sort of tired displeasure he typically reserved for the most idiotic injuries patients presented him with. “You get my gist. I really don’t understand it.”

“I don’t see that there’s much to understand,” Herbert said primly. “It’s disgusting.”

“It’s not objectively disgusting, Herbert; you just don’t like it. There’s a difference.”

“I see there’s no convincing you.” Herbert stared down into his soup bowl, tapping his fingernail against the pale blue porcelain. He ran his teeth over his lower lip, and Stephen could see him fighting a smile. “Go on eating your revolting crab soup. Just remember, I don’t have any of the materials I’d need to save you if it poisons you. But by all means, keep on eating it.”

“Thank you.” With a hint of laughter, “I will.”

-0-0-0-

After departing Parker’s, the rest of the town seemed somewhat more primitive to Stephen’s eyes than it had before. It was perhaps inevitable that he would regard it that way; it had been long enough since he’d last been confronted with such a display of modernity that everything else was bound to look a little archaic by comparison. But once he had left the department store, it was easier to take notice of how narrow the alleys were, how old the buildings, how thoroughly uneven the paving of the brick streets. Even the locals’ mode of dress seemed a little outdated, compared even to the likes of Arkham and Bolton. A tourist could be easily distinguished by the fact that they wore sack coats instead of frock coats, or the lack of a massive bustle under their skirts.

Tourists could also be distinguished by the fact that all of them were looking as Stephen felt: ever so slightly disoriented. He hadn’t noticed it on the ascent, or he’d noticed it but hadn’t really absorbed the information, but the streets and lanes all had a certain sameness that made navigating them without becoming lost more than a little difficult. The fact that so few of them were marked by street signs didn’t help. Even Herbert, who by the sound of it had lived here for around a year, was constantly, if silently, second-guessing himself—when they came to a crossroads, more than half of the time, Herbert would walk a few yards down one of the streets before changing his mind about the direction and choosing a second path instead.

They still had some time before they needed to be back at the train station. Kingsport wasn’t an especially large town. Stephen wasn’t quite worried, not yet. It was hard not to be a little weary, though, given how long they’d been wandering the town (it felt longer than it really had been) with the sun beating down on his back.

“I have a question.”

There was wind and there were roaring waves, but there was very little talking. The pedestrians they passed tended either to pass in silence or, if they were in groups, quiet murmurs at the very loudest. Stephen didn’t think there was any real fear in the quiet, but he could at times sense a certain tension there, and he’d never met a strain of tension he didn’t want to break.

Herbert turned his head minutely towards him; he seemed to be devoting an unusual amount of attention to the path before him, another of those narrow alleys, though given how often they’d taken a wrong turn, maybe it wasn’t unusual after all. “What is it?”

“There was a house at the very top of this hill, far away from the rest of the town.” Stephen had caught a few more glimpses of the house since disembarking from the train; a barely perceptible speck of gray against the vivid, almost painfully bright blue of the sky. “I wanted to know what it is.”

At that, Herbert paused so long Stephen thought he might refuse outright to answer. But then, he shrugged. “I don’t know much about it, myself; the people here don’t like to talk about it.”

“Is it like the things people in Arkham don’t like to talk about?”

“I really don’t know; I’d need more information. What I do know—“ Herbert stopped to stand in the shade of a stack of wooden crates, mopping his brow with the palm of his right hand “—is that many people in town think the house is haunted.”

In 1901, the suggestion would have been ridiculous. In 1901, Stephen was fresh-arrived in Arkham and hadn’t heard enough of the whispers, hadn’t seen enough things that just didn’t make any sense. In 1901, he would have dismissed it immediately out of hand, wouldn’t have even considered the possibility.

“Is it?”

It was 1906, now, and Stephen had seen and heard enough things that didn’t make any sense that he wasn’t willing to dismiss anything out of hand.

Herbert picked at the back of his hand. “I don’t know,” he admitted. “The house must be hundreds of years old; everyone agrees it was built at the same time the town was founded, so nearly three hundred years old, now. No one’s ever seen anyone coming or going from the house in the daylight; I know _I_ haven’t—“ his mouth curled in a lopsided half-smile, half-grimace “—and I assure you, watching that house was one of the favorite activities of the boys my age at the school when I attended there. If someone was coming or going from the house while the sun was out, one of us would have known.”

Stephen took a place at his side in the shade, craning his neck to look more closely into his face. “You never saw anything during the day. What about during at night?”

As before, there was no immediate answer. Stephen watched as Herbert edged a little further into the shade, the half-smile fading from his face to be replaced by something more reminiscent, more ambivalent.

“There were times when I would see a candle in the window—or what looked like a candle, anyhow.” Herbert stared at the opposite wall without really seeming to see it. “It was clearly coming from within the house; it wasn’t a reflection on the window from down in the town, wasn’t a light shining beyond it that merely _looked_ as if it was coming from the window.” Fingers reached up to scratch at an arm thankfully covered in linen and wool; Stephen had once or twice watched him break the skin doing something similar when his arms were bare. “There _was_ a candle lit in that window.”

“I believe you.” Stephen risked putting a hand to Herbert’s shoulder. “I’ve never known you to lie about things like this; I don’t think you’d start now.”

Herbert’s shoulder quaked as a small laugh escaped his mouth. “Do you know, some of my schoolmates once sent me up the hillside on a dare? I was supposed to make it all the way up the house, knock on the door, and see if anyone answered?”

“Did you?” It wasn’t that difficult, honestly, to imagine Herbert as a child, sneaking out of his school to go see if a reputedly haunted house was actually haunted. Stephen could almost imagine him doing it of his own initiative, out of sheer curiosity, if not for how wary of similar things Herbert had been back in Arkham.

Blue eyes flitted up to regard him for a long moment. “…Not all of the way. As the hill grows steeper, I began to find my path blocked by ravines. I finally found one I couldn’t find a way around, and…” He sighed, and said on the exhale, “and I was afraid the headmaster would realize I wasn’t there. I was back in my bed around an hour before dawn. I lied and told the other boys I had made it all the way up, and there wasn’t anyone in the house.” Another laugh, barely audible over the wind, made itself heard. “I don’t think they believed me, but _they_ weren’t going to go up there and check, so their reluctance to admit that preserved my lie until it was time for me to come home.”

Stephen’s own laugh was considerably louder as he jostled Herbert’s shoulder. “Would you go back up there now?”

Oh, the legend-haunted Miskatonic Valley. Stephen had never heard of a place that had more strange tales and happenings attached to it than this one. More haunts and ghouls per square mile than there were people in some parts of it, he had no doubt.

“Absolutely not,” though there was slightly less tension in Herbert’s voice than Stephen had expected, given the way he had spoken while talking about the house. “I have so many, far more important uses for my time than chasing—“

A shadow fell over them, denser than the one cast by the crates.

Standing at the entrance to the alleyway they had entered by, was a woman. Her dress was a splash of yellow against the backdrop of scarlet brick, a yellow both dizzyingly bright and oddly sickly in hue. Her large, wide-brimmed, white-ribboned black hat obscured the top half of her face in shadow, but the lower half of her face was clearly visible. She wore a wide, unwavering smile.

Stephen started to take a step forward, to see if she needed something, but he fell short. She just stood there, perfectly still, perfectly silent, and the longer she stood there, the more Stephen’s stomach began to churn. Her smile looked so familiar…

Herbert tapped his shoulder. He wasn’t looking at the woman, though Stephen could see the muscles in his jaw starting to pull taut. Herbert motioned with his head towards the other end of the alley.

Loath as he was to turn his back on the strangely-smiling woman, Stephen followed.

They stepped out of the alley onto a street that was in no way familiar, and was choked with a crowd of people.

At the first, Stephen didn’t really engage with the crowd on a person-by-person basis; he just saw a seething mass of slow-moving, brightly-dressed bodies. “What’s this?” The wind was so loud that it drowned his voice entirely within the wailing of its own. “Some kind of parade?”

But that didn’t make any sense. Independence Day was more than two weeks off, and unless Kingsport had some kind of celebration completely unique to itself, there was no reason for this that he could think of, none at all…

Stephen nearly jumped when he felt the hand on his arm.

“We’ve taken a wrong turn,” Herbert craned his neck to whisper close to his ear. He slipped his arm through the crook of Stephen’s elbow, clutching Stephen’s upper arm with his hand. “Stay close to me.”

Stephen gaped down at their linked arms. “Have you completely lost your—“

“They will not care.” Herbert wore an expression that others would have thought perfectly calm, but Stephen could see how very bright his eyes were, how they darted from one moving shape to the next. “Stay with me. Don’t panic.”

They had to get to the train station. Herbert might have gotten lost half a dozen times since they had left Parker’s, but he still had a better idea of where they were going than Stephen. When Stephen looked back, he saw the woman in yellow walking towards them, silent, unhurried, and wearing still that smile that seemed so familiar. He let Herbert lead him out into the crowd.

The moment they were in the crowd, the strangeness of the situation began to become horribly apparent. The crowd was wholly unaware of their presence, or else they gave every impression of ignorance. Not a single one of them made an effort to step out of Stephen and Herbert’s path, leaving them to thread a narrow, winding path that constantly saw them jostled and bumped into with no attempt made at an apology. Stephen was trying not to stare, he really was, but those who met his gaze, even for a moment, stared right through him, eyes glassy and nearly vacant.

Sun blazed down upon them, and the swirls of color were dizzying. As blue and purple and green and red and yellow danced in and out of Stephen’s line of vision, nausea began to build as a knot of bile in his throat. He was almost leaning his weight against Herbert’s side as they walked slowly on. Attempts to look at the buildings to either side of the street that seethed with this mass of bodies provided little in the way of relief. His eyes kept sliding off of the glinting gold letters of the shop signs whenever he tried to read them, sending shoots of pain in his skull like someone had driven needles into his brow, just above his eyes.

Stephen wasn’t certain just how long they had been struggling their way through the crowd when the noise began to die away. Ever since he had stepped off of the train, his ears had been filled with the howling wind and the raging sea, each vying for supremacy. It had been so loud that it was difficult to hear himself think over it, and even more difficult to make himself heard. But slowly, ever so slowly, both of these began to absent themselves. The wind no longer blew, no longer howled in his ears or battered at the awnings and the hats and hair of the passersby. Somewhere out of sight, the sea went utterly flat. Or Stephen had passed into a place where he could no longer hear it.

The only thing he could hear were the footsteps of himself and the others on the brick street. Otherwise, there was silence.

There was perfect silence.

Out of everyone in the street, everyone in the pressing, milling throng, absolutely no one raised their voice to speak.

All of Stephen’s resolutions not to stare turned to ash the moment he registered the silence. There was something wrong, _this_ was wrong, even funeral processions had people in them willing to whisper to the person walking next to them, and this was clearly not that _, something_ was wrong.

He began to look at faces, and very soon understood, at least in part, what was wrong.

(He would never understand in full. He did not wish to.)

Every last face he saw was the same shade of pallid, chalky white. Not a single face to be seen that bore any hue of brown. None of them had freckles, or moles. None of them even had the tan you would expect from spending time outside on bright summer days. They all had skin that was exactly the same pallid, sickly shade.

That wasn’t what knocked the air out of Stephen’s lungs. That wasn’t what birthed the static electricity of a building scream in his mind.

They were smiling.

They were all smiling.

Every last one of them had exactly the same smile.

It wasn’t a smirk or a shy little smile, wasn’t a child’s beam or an adult’s quiet smile of satisfaction. It was a rictus grin that exposed a strip of white that resembled teeth and yet didn’t. It never quivered, never wavered, never twitched. It was exactly the same on all of them, without the slightest bit of variation.

He knew that smile.

Stephen didn’t realize he had stopped walking until Herbert began to tug insistently on his arm, spurring him forwards. “Keep walking,” he hissed. “Try to breathe evenly,” and that was the first moment at which Stephen realized how much his chest ached from the thin, high gasps that barely left his mouth.

“I’m sorry,” he managed, in a high, reedy voice that barely resembled his voice at all.

Herbert’s taut face softened, barely perceptibly. “It’s alright. Just keep walking. There’s an end.” He looked ahead, gritted his teeth. “There’s an end.”

Stephen didn’t know how long they walked. Herbert’s hand gripped his arm tighter and tighter the longer they walked, until his fingers pressed so tightly that blood barely seemed able to flow, and Stephen was certain he would find bruises later. They cleaved close to each other’s sides, drawing even closer each time they one of the ghastly-smiling figures bumped into one of them. Stephen dreaded the idea of separation, thought he might collapse if he saw Herbert swallowed up into the crowd of silent smilers. The edges of his vision were starting to go dark and fuzzy; it was a herculean effort just to catch a breath. He felt as if he had walked the whole length of the town, and the sea of silent, brightly dressed, smiling figures just kept flowing towards them.

And then, they faced a brick wall crumbling with age and neglect, and the wind was in Stephen’s ears, and the sea roared somewhere behind him.

“There’s the train station.” Herbert disentangled his arm from Stephen’s, pointed off towards their left. “Come on; we don’t have much time.”

Dignity be damned, they both ran until they were tearing past a bewildered conductor and jumping onto the train, not daring to slow down until they were in their compartment and Herbert was slamming the door shut behind them with a clang.

Stephen collapsed onto his seat with a shudder, the paper bag with his newly-bought camera and film sliding from his trembling hand. He barely heard the thud the bag made as it hit the floor.

He thought, for a moment, of their flight from the Chapman farmhouse more than two years ago. But then, the horror didn’t follow them back into town, didn’t press on all sides for what could have been minutes or hours. Still at the door, Herbert muttered something, but Stephen’s pulse pounded in his ears and he couldn’t make out a word of it. He took a few sick gasps of air, but his lungs screamed at him in turn and he couldn’t say how long it would be before he would stop feeling half-strangled by his own panic.

Oh, the legend-haunted Miskatonic Valley. At least in Arkham, it hadn’t been too difficult to avoid wandering into its path.

“That was…” Stephen’s pulse had slowed just enough for him to make out Herbert’s voice, as he watched the man fumble with the handle of the compartment door, scrabbling for a lock that wasn’t there and wouldn’t materialize, no matter how he might have wished for it. “…That was worse than usual.” He stepped away from the door. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen more than three or four of them together at one time.” Another step away, then another. “That… that was much worse than usual.” He sank down onto his seat, with a visible quake in his shoulders. “I don’t think I’ve ever _heard_ of—oh!”

Any fear of discovery Stephen might earlier have felt fled him the moment Herbert placed himself in reach. With a desperation he barely recognized in himself, he lunged forward and snatched Herbert up into his arms, clutching tightly at his small, trembling body. “I can’t believe you used to live here,” he blurted out, from where he’d buried his face in Herbert’s hair.

“It…” Somewhat hesitantly, Herbert slid his arms around Stephen’s back. “It wasn’t for very long,” he said lamely. “Less than a year.”

Stephen loosened his grip just long enough to kiss him roughly, mashing their mouths together with a clumsiness that would have embarrassed him if his heart wasn’t still beating so hard he thought it might crawl out of his throat. Herbert grasped at his upper arm with a shaking hand.

“What _was_ that?” Stephen finally found it in himself to ask, as the train clattered into life, the shrill cry of the train whistle making itself faintly heard within the train.

“I don’t know.” Herbert’s voice was faintly muffled, though one could hardly expect anything less, given how he’d pressed his face into Stephen’s chest. “There may be people who know just what that was, but I doubt they’re in a state that bears giving an explanation.” A high, jittery laugh that managed to be jarringly loud, despite its thin timbre. “It’s the sort of knowledge rarely given absent its price.”

There was something Stephen had heard before, from many different sources, including the man currently trying to fold himself so completely into his embrace that he might wink out of existence. “Another mystery. _Fantastic_.”

“Well, there’s a reason I didn’t live here even a full year.” Herbert shifted his weight, leaving him rather less in Stephen’s lap than he had been before. (It would be easier to disentangle themselves more quickly that way if someone came along—and that fact did little to console a man who felt as if he and the man he held might disappear completely if they let go.) He then rested the side of his head against Stephen’s chest, fisted a hand in his jacket, and let out a shaky little sigh when Stephen began to stroke his windswept hair.

“In Arkham,” Herbert said quietly, “it’s enough to keep your distance. Perhaps the day will come when that is no longer enough, but for now, keeping your distance and keeping your head down is enough to keep you safe.” He curled his lip. “I do not consider such a state of affairs _ideal_ ; far from it. But when the forces arrayed against you are as far beyond human understanding as what exists,” he added, and now his voice took on a decidedly, if understatedly, bleak tone, “and you cannot gain knowledge without risking yourself—or losing yourself completely—you’ll find you have few choices.” He grimaced. “At least when reading material is so restricted.”

Stephen had been silent while he spoke. He had never heard Herbert be so open about it, never heard him say so much without stopping himself. But when he came to a more natural close, “And in Kingsport?”

“Ha!” Herbert shook his head, then craned his neck to look up into Stephen’s face. “It’s… random. The house on top of the hill is a constant, but _that_ … Honestly, I think the only real defense against that is to never notice it, never seek it out. I’ve never had any talent for not noticing things.” He smiled tiredly, reached up to smooth down Stephen’s shirt collar. “Neither have you, or so it seems.”

A laugh, only slightly giddy, bubbled up in Stephen’s chest. He reeled Herbert back in a little closer with the arm he had wrapped around his shoulders. “I’d take the compliment,” he murmured into pale, soft hair, “but I was an appallingly oblivious child.”

“You wouldn’t have lasted two weeks here.”

“Likely not, no.”

The train began to move, carrying them away from sunny, over-saturated Kingsport, back towards furtive, depopulated Arkham. Stephen didn’t think he had ever been so happy to leave a town behind. He hadn’t been, as an adolescent, one of those boys with no fondness for his hometown, desperate to leave. If things had turned out differently, Stephen suspected he would have gone right back to Chicago after he obtained his degree, and never once regretted the decision, not even when he was trying to compete against the more established physicians in the city. Such a deep sense of relief to be leaving a place behind, hopefully for good, was not a familiar feeling.

Stephen knew what he would see if he looked out the window. He turned his gaze away.

“Would…” The worst of his panic had faded. He wasn’t clinging to Herbert out of a need for reassurance, not entirely; he couldn’t say what passed through Herbert’s mind. But. “Would you be very annoyed if I just didn’t let go of you until we got back to Arkham?”

“You’re going to have to let go eventually,” Herbert said dryly. “The train does pass through part of Arkham before reaching the station; I think _this_ would be just a little difficult to explain to the people who could see into the car through the window.

“Just a little?” Stephen laughed—and this one _did_ sound giddy and wobbly, even to his own ears—and cupped Herbert’s narrow chin with his hand. Herbert scrunched up his face when Stephen pressed a quick, teasing kiss to the tip of his nose; the chuckle that followed sounded, mercifully, rather less giddy and wobbly. “Are you sure it’s ‘just a little?’”

“ _Yes_.” Herbert shoved his chest—not hard, certainly not hard enough to hurt, but still forcefully enough to get the point across. “And it will be all the more difficult to explain in _here_ , so stop that.” Herbert eyed him. “We have a few hours until we’re home.”

Herbert leaned his head against his shoulder, leaned over to grasp Stephen’s free hand in his own, much smaller one, and was silent. His hand trembled slightly as he ran his thumb over Stephen’s knuckles, but his grip was tight, as if Herbert shared Stephen’s earlier belief, as if he thought Stephen would just vanish if he let go.

They were going home.

Home.

Stephen sighed, and turned his attention to the window. It was with relief that he watched remote Kingsport wink out of sight as they turned a bend in the route through the marshes. That relief shriveled into an ambivalent husk as the color began to seep from the world, and everything returned to the duller hues that heralded Arkham’s approach.

The prospect of returning home didn’t grant him quite the sense of peace it had before.


	4. Chapter Four

They were just going to have to use the gentler stuff until either Urquhart had the stronger back in stock, or one of them could make the trip to Boston. (Disinfectant still seemed like a ridiculous thing for them to have exposed themselves to whatever that street in Kingsport had been over.) Herbert was trying to get his hands on a mail order catalogue that carried what they were after, but Stephen didn’t think he was going to have much luck, there. Bolton never featured on any maps of Massachusetts that did not satisfy two requirements: being first newer than twenty years old, and second covering an area no larger than the Miskatonic Valley. Stephen wasn’t entirely certain that they could even get delivery from Boston.

Just a few days back from Kingsport, and the entire trip there, every last bit of strangeness and unease and terror, seemed less real with each passing hour. The details began to blur together in Stephen’s head, taking on the quality of an unpleasant dream. Back in Bolton, where reality was set, where the foundations of the town were too fresh for legends to take root, their experiences in that ancient town seemed so surreal that if Stephen had read it in a book, he would have regarded the story as ridiculous.

_If I was going to be intimidated by the esoteric, I would have gone home after my first year in Arkham._

When he thought about it, in the few moments he had in between dealing with patients, filling out paperwork, working down in the basement, he thought about the fact that the lifelong residents of the Miskatonic Valley had not, as of yet, been driven out en masse. He knew that, from time to time, there would come a small stream of people fleeing out, fleeing to Boston or New York City or Providence. He knew that, of course, there were the scattered individuals who left the valley far behind them, either because the weight of the weird and the esoteric had become too much for them to bear, or because they simply had no prospects of comfortable employment within an area that the last few decades seemed to have touched only sporadically. The same as with any area where prosperity was difficult to come by, there were more people leaving than there were entering.

But there were families living here that had lived here since the first Puritans had set foot on the shores of Massachusetts centuries ago. There were so many who clung so stubbornly to the land that they had claimed as their own, no matter what horrors seeped out from the deep places and the darkest shadows. Thinly sketched they might have been, these horrors, or at least they were to Stephen, who had never received an account that wasn’t talked around, never had an encounter more direct and more prolonged than the one he had had so recently in Kingsport. Thinly sketched, but with each year that passed, Stephen was less of a skeptic than he had been when he first arrived here. He’d denied it to himself for a long time, but he couldn’t anymore. There were things that moved in the dark, things that moved in the daylight, and the only people who could claim to know the shape of them had all been devoured long ago.

And yet, there were people living here who would sooner die than leave it. Whether it was a genuine love that sparked this loyalty, or merely stubbornness, Stephen couldn’t say. He didn’t share their devotion. He didn’t know how much longer it would be, for him. (He wouldn’t be leaving alone. He knew that much. The only way he would be leaving was in company. The length of time between his endurance running out and his company being ready to leave as well, he couldn’t predict.)

For now, he did have something happier to think about, something that didn’t place demands on him.

Stephen had had little experience with cameras, though he did like the idea of having photos taken, liked the idea of having photos in general. When he was a child, there was a boy who had lived a few houses down from Stephen and his family. The boy’s father had been a photographer, his mother an heiress of, if not great wealth, than at least more-than-decent means, and the result of that had been that his father had more than a couple expensive, high-quality cameras, and quite a lot of photo albums full of black-and-white photographs, along with a respectable amount of color. Not just of people, but of landscapes of every place the man had ever visited.

That was the first taste Stephen had gotten of traveling, looking at the world through another person’s eyes. It wasn’t a taste he had been allowed to personally indulge until years later, but it had planted the seeds of curiosity, and seeds of a desire for _remembering_ as well. Upon learning of his interest, the photographer had begun to take a few photographs when he traveled that he would deposit into Stephen’s hand upon returning home. _‘This is where I was. I don’t know if I’ll ever go back, but this is what I have to remember it by, and this is what you have to imagine what it to be, until you can go see it yourself.’_

He never had learned how to use a camera as a boy, but the Kodak Brownie was a simple device. _It_ was made with children in mind; the controls had to be simple. Well. Stephen had bought it. Bought it off of a possibly eldritch shopkeeper, but bought it all the same. It was his, now. He might as well use it.

-0-0-0-

Hot air rises and cool air sinks. Such was the conventional wisdom, and such was what had been taught to Herbert ever since he was a boy. He had some objections to that particular bit of conventional wisdom—namely, that it didn’t really seem to hold in winter, when the warmest part of any given house was the part of it closest to either the furnace, the stove, or both, and the upper floors of said house tended to be absolutely miserable in their frigidity, unless special measures were taken. But the conventional wisdom _certainly_ held in summer, and even more certainly in this little house. If not for the lack of natural light, Herbert thought he might have bedded down in the basement at night, and spent nearly as much time in it during the day. The ground floor of the house was uncomfortably warm, the second floor a few degrees shy of hellish. They’d open the windows, but the bugs had been out in force outside—there were entirely too many ponds in the area where mosquitoes and the like could spawn—and Herbert had no intention of contending with them within his own home.

The basement having been rejected for its dearth of natural light, Herbert had taken to doing the necessary paperwork and the less-necessary, but still desired, reading, in the sitting room that doubled during working hours as their waiting room. Of course, this necessitated doing it all in the evenings. Herbert had no desire either for his patients to get a look at documents they shouldn’t, or for them to learn exactly what his taste in literature was. He had already dealt with enough high-handed opprobrium in his life regarding the books he read; his patience for it shrank every time he encountered someone else who thought he just _had_ to hear their opinion.

It would soon be dark enough to require lamp light to read by, and another half hour after that, the house would finally start to cool a little. Never enough to be entirely comfortable—Herbert suspected he wouldn’t have comfort until somewhere in the middle of September—but the second floor of the house would no longer feel as if multiple bonfires which produced no smoke and were invisible to the naked eye had been lit within its bounds. It would no longer be so hot that Herbert felt as if he would drown in his own sweat while he slept. That had to count for—Well. It didn’t count for _much_. It did count for _something_.

The sitting room was a little cooler—cool enough to read in, cool enough to wonder if his patients read much by Arthur Machen. The lack of anything resembling a public library in Bolton and the half-finished rail line connecting Bolton with Arkham limited access to reading materials, obviously, but Herbert thought that some of the adolescents whose injuries he’d been patching up lately might have a taste for horror, if only they were allowed to foster it. Of course, it was probably a little hard to hide parentally-forbidden material in houses as tiny as those in the mill village, but he could remember being sixteen and having to be creative about concealing far more many things than just the books his then-guardians didn’t care for. He had faith in their creativity.

Herbert was nearly at the point where he was going to get up to turn on the lamp when he heard a sharp, crisp ‘click’ from the edge of the room.

Old habits die hard, and Herbert was slamming his book shut and setting it down hastily, front cover-down, on his lap. He hated the jolt of panic that flared briefly in his stomach, but it was, after all, his own fault, for thinking of the past.

And oh, it wasn’t as if the source of the sound was anything threatening. Herbert looked up, and there was Stephen, standing in the doorway, holding the camera he’d bought in Kingsport.

“So, the camera’s working?” A split-second later, somewhat more sharply, “That had best not be a photograph of _me_ you just took.” Most men would have had few qualms about being photographed sans jacket, tie, and collar in the privacy of their own home. Most practicing doctors were not regularly mistaken for sixteen-year-old boys. Herbert had no desire to add fuel to that particular fire; his patience waned every time the mistake was made, and it _would_ turn into a conflagration if fanned long enough.

Stephen, who had likely not been taken for a sixteen-year-old boy since he actually _was_ a sixteen-year-old boy, smiled and shrugged slightly as he entered the room. “I’ll see it isn’t circulated too widely.”

“I do not find that reassuring.”

Laughingly, “Then I’ll keep it private. It’s not every day I get the chance to see you even slightly unbuttoned; I’ll treasure it always.”

Herbert felt his face grow warm, which, all things considered, was completely absurd. “You’re ridiculous,” he muttered.

The sitting room-cum-waiting room was not terribly large; in about three strides, Stephen was at the old sofa, sitting down and setting the camera down on the small, low table. The new, pristine camera looked out of place against the worn surface it lied on.

“I _am_ ridiculous,” Stephen agreed blithely. He looped his arm around Herbert’s shoulders (Herbert felt the tension in his back start to seep out, slowly) and bent down to kiss his hair. “And you, darling, are taking this too seriously.”

“If that is what you wish to believe, I see no way to persuade you otherwise. _Is_ the camera working?”

“It seems to be.” Stephen stretched his arm forward, pressed his hand on top of the boxy little camera. “Mind, I won’t know for sure until I get the film developed, but there doesn’t seem to be anything wrong with the exterior of the camera.”

The look of fondness he directed towards the camera was one Herbert absorbed with just a touch of foreboding. It wasn’t a self-conscious kind of fondness, or a nostalgic kind of fondness. It looked more like… Well, he’d give Stephen a chance to prove him wrong, before he made any comment on it.

“Hmm.” Herbert leaned back into Stephen’s arm, let his head rest against his side. (The slackening of his posture always felt wrong, somewhere in the back of his mind, when he first let rigidity slide. But the feeling would pass, so long as touch was not withdrawn.) “It’s a pity we can’t use it in our research. Photographic documentation would be invaluable in our experiments.” He sighed and shook his head. It probably would have gone better for him not to remind himself of their experiments—in so doing, he inevitably reminded himself also of the dearth of bodies suitable for them. “But the police wouldn’t look kindly on it, and I can only imagine all the ways they could misconstrue what they saw.”

“And we’d have the devil’s own time explaining it to the photographer developing the film,” Stephen agreed, nodding slightly. He smiled, eyes crinkling upwards. “But you can get more use out of a camera than just using it for medical documentation.”

As a child, Herbert had spent more time than was either advisable or generally regarded as sane being made to sit very still for the benefit of the slow-working behemoths operated by the professional photographer. He had heard certain people compare his appearance to that of a porcelain doll—when posing for the camera, he certainly _felt_ like one. Even knowing that the model Stephen had picked up worked more quickly than those, “And what use is that?” was asked without much in the way of enthusiasm.

“Whatever use you like.”

Stephen said the words like what he was describing was something wonderful. Herbert’s sense of foreboding only deepened.

“Anyways…” Stephen leaned over, dropped another kiss on Herbert’s hair (it didn’t feel as foreign as it used to; Herbert prayed it never felt foreign again), and stood abruptly from the sofa. “I’ll stop bothering you.”

Herbert stared down into his lap. “You’re not a bother,” he mumbled.

While he was staring still at his lap, he felt a hand gave his shoulder a quick, gentle squeeze. He watched Stephen scoop his camera up from the table. “If you need me, I’ll be outside. I want to get out there while there’s still some light.”

Herbert nodded without looking up. But just before Stephen left the room, he did look up, and called out, “Stephen?”

Stephen turned on his heel at the doorway. “Yes?”

“I’m not a model,” Herbert said flatly.

Teasingly, “No?”

“No.”

“I’ll remember that.”

 _We’ll see_.

With that, Stephen left the room, and soon enough, the sound of a slamming door heralded him leaving the house altogether. He was a grown man who could do what he liked in the yard outside of his own home, and this was not Arkham; there was nothing lurking in the woods that could have done him harm. Herbert did not follow him outside, and instead tried to focus again on his reading. He hadn’t had time in a long time for Machen; he _would_ like to reacquaint himself with the man’s work.

For a few minutes, he was able to read in peace. Just a few minutes.

The windows in the sitting room overlooked the land adjacent to the path leading to the potter’s field. Two patches of flowery meadow bisected by a strip of forest with uncommonly dense undergrowth. The flowers had mostly died off when the heat began to become oppressive, though some hardy summer specimens still remained. Even Herbert would admit that the scenery was picturesque; he was hardly without an eye for beauty, though he knew his tastes diverged in certain respects from what was considered conventional.

While he was trying to read, movement from outside of one of those windows overlooking the meadow caught his eye. Herbert looked up, and sure enough, there was Stephen with his camera, taking photo after photo of his surroundings, seemingly heedless of the way the dying light would affect the quality of the photographs themselves.

Well, there was Herbert’s suspicion confirmed.

He watched his partner fiddle with his camera for a few moments before, before pinching the bridge of his nose and screwing his eyes shut. “Oh, my.”


	5. Chapter Five

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [ **CN/TW** : Mentions of period-typical child labor; mentions of period-typical unsafe working conditions; mention of harm to a child]

Their first summer in Bolton dragged gradually onwards towards the opening of July. The heat only intensified, and as the heat intensified, so did the swarms of insects that plagued the area—and by plague, Herbert was almost thinking of it in Biblical terms by now. It was almost enough to make him wish he could take refuge in the icy waters of one of the nearby creeks, as every child who did not spend their days immured in the textile mill seemed to be doing. Wouldn’t that be pleasant?

But, apparently, being a doctor made him some sort of authority figure in town, and being sighted swimming in a creek would erode his authority, and his credibility right along with it. Apparently. Besides that, he had no desire to expose his body either to sunburn or to scrutiny. He was taken often enough for an adolescent boy; the revelation that he was scrawny enough to _be_ one wouldn’t help matters. So Herbert could find no refuge in water. He couldn’t even open a window, for all the insects.

Give it about a month and a half, and the weather would start to cool, if only minutely at first (And only if 1906 didn’t reveal itself to be as sweltering as 1905 had been). Herbert thought he might start to melt before that could happen. If the iceman was having as difficult a time as he claimed keeping his wares solid long enough to make his deliveries, a human being might, provided every reality of human biology was forgotten (Herbert had seen examples of such; he was not willing to play the skeptic blindly), melt also.

Probably.

Maybe.

Maybe his dreams lately had been a bit more vivid than he cared to admit.

High summer was more than capable of keeping two young doctors in a mill town busy. Heatstroke was becoming a serious problem at the mill, bordering on epidemic. It was especially bad among the children, adolescents, and very young adults who worked there; they’d already had one near miss with an eleven-year-old girl. (The sour tang of desperation returned to coat Herbert’s tongue at odd moments, always when unexpected. He couldn’t do a thing for her if she died there. He didn’t have any of the reagent with him, and would never have been able to inject it without drawing notice. He had nothing which could reliably restore sapience after death. They hadn’t done any experiments on children, hadn’t determined what the appropriate volume of serum would be for a child. There was nothing he could do for her if she died, and thus, she had to live.) The mill was turning into an oven, and the millworkers were beginning to take on a worrying resemblance to roast pork.

Negotiations for Herbert and Stephen to spend alternating afternoons at the textile mill, on hand in case someone began to show signs of succumbing to the heat, or had one of the accidents which almost inevitably came about when one was dehydrated and woozy, were ongoing. The mill couldn’t seem to grasp how many of their patients Herbert and Stephen would have to neglect in order to be stationed at the mill for part of the day. Nor could they grasp how much income the two doctors they were trying to call on stood to lose—though given just how poorly the mill paid its workers, maybe the men at the top really _did_ think people they employed could subsist on air, as Herbert had heard some of his patients mutter.

Maybe when someone finally died from the mill’s bitter heat, the mill would be a bit more accommodating to the demands Herbert made regarding pay. He hoped it wouldn’t come to that, though. Not only would the death be completely unnecessary, Herbert was sure someone would find a way to blame himself or Stephen for it.

Beyond all of this, Herbert had his hands full peeling leeches off of flinching children who insisted they couldn’t possibly do it themselves, no matter how he had them watch him do it. Much moaning and screaming and gnashing of teeth ensued. Alberto Farina had been especially bad; the little boy had actually fainted around the time Herbert pulled the fourth leech off, to the mingled fury and dismay of his parents.

His hands were equally full patching up the injuries of young men who had clearly been boxing in secret, no matter their increasingly far-fetched ‘explanations’ for how they came to be injured. It had been a struggle not to laugh when one of them tried to claim he’d had an altercation with a _bull_ , of all things, to try to explain the distinctly human-made bruises across his chest; any questions as to whether the man had been gored were met with a blank stare. Ah, well. Herbert thought he was close to a breakthrough, there. O’Brien had been regarding him with less caution over the last couple of months; it was only a matter of time before Herbert was deep enough in his confidence to broach the subject with him directly.

If he could keep from overreaching, anyways.

High summer kept them both quite busy, and yet, Stephen found the time to seemingly constantly fiddle with his new camera. Herbert could not imagine why anyone would want to take photos of either the exterior or the interior of their house, which wasn’t exactly a vision of loveliness even after all the modifications that had been made to make it livable. Stephen, for some reason, if he wasn’t taking photos, could be found examining that rather less than lovely house to decide what would be best to photograph. He had thus far not taken any further photographs of Herbert, at least none that Herbert was aware of, but he suspected that when the film was developed, he would show up in the margins of many of the others.

What was it about cameras that made some people turn into borderline-voyeurs, or just made them obsessed with documenting _everything_? Give a man a camera, and suddenly everything about life everywhere around him was far more interesting than it had any right to be, and fair game for being immortalized in celluloid.

At least in Stephen’s case, Herbert suspected it was due to boredom. There was little to do in Bolton that wasn’t work, or taking walks in the woods. Actually, walking around in the woods as a leisure activity wasn’t worth it when the wet heat made your clothes stick to your skin and the mosquitoes were engaged in open warfare for the right to suck your face completely dry of blood. So there was little to do but work, and work, and work. And in the absence of corpses in such a state as to make them usable for experiments, just one kind of work.

(There were other things they could do, of course, in the privacy of their own home at times when they weren’t likely to be called upon. It was… Well, it wasn’t a daytime activity, especially not when there was every possibility that someone would appear at their door without prior appointment. And considering the weather lately, it wasn’t always particularly _comfortable_ , even in the dead of the night.)

There was precious little to do around Bolton asides from work, and thus, Herbert supposed it was inevitable that if Stephen picked up a hobby, he was going to get every last bit of enjoyment out of it that he could. But really…

He’d run out of film, soon. He had to be close to running out of film. With all of the photos he had taken of the house, its exterior, and the nearby meadow, he had to be close to running out of film. Had to be.

-0-0-0-

Bolton didn’t seem interested in doing much for decorating in anticipation of Independence Day. Maybe that was for the best, Stephen mused, as he and Herbert walked down one of the streets in the little collection that made up the heart of the town. There’d be a lot of fireworks, a lot of drinking, and a lot of carousing that was bound to lead to brawling on the part of millworkers who had little to do outside of work _but_ drink. And fight. The fighting would likely damage the decorations too much for them to be used the following year, unless they were strung up far out of reach of grabbing hands. The _complete_ lack of decorations in town did make things a little dreary, though. Even Arkham put up some extra flags.

Though neither had ever elaborated on it, Stephen had gathered that Herbert and the assistant pharmacist had some kind of history together. Stephen wasn’t often in Herbert’s company when the latter made visits to the pharmacy, and every time he was, he had the odd experience of watching Herbert grow much more freely talkative in Miss Watson’s presence than he had in nearly anyone else’s. (Though Stephen thought a certain warming-up period had been involved; the first few conversations he’d borne witness to had seen Herbert rather stilted, at least for the first few minutes.) He couldn’t help but notice it; after all, it wasn’t every day he watched Herbert West stop and _chat_ with someone.

“I really do think they’re trying to make their own fireworks; I had one of them in here asking if I had potassium nitrate.”

Herbert pinched the bridge of his nose, gritted his teeth. “Lovely. I’ll keep an eye out for burns.”

Miss Watson raised an eyebrow quizzically. “Will you _tell_ me if you see any burns?”

Somewhat stiffly, “I have a certain obligation not to disclose whatever idiocy my patients get up to, Miss Watson.”

She rolled her eyes. “Of _course_.”

From the far corner of the waiting area, Stephen watched in bemusement as they talked. If he had to guess, he’d say the two were roughly of an age with each other. It was highly unlikely that they had ever attended the same school, but maybe they had known each other, back in Arkham? Stephen shifted the bag slung over his shoulder as he thought about it. Mister Watson had said that he and his daughter were both from Arkham. No, he hadn’t needed to be told that; _he_ had called upon Mister Watson often enough, back when he was the assistant pharmacist in Arkham. The Watsons _were_ from Arkham.

So, those two. Likely never schoolmates, but they clearly had known each other in some capacity.

“Have you seen, Urquhart’s got some children’s toys in his store now?” The smile that had come so suddenly over Miss Watson’s lips was so knowing that the sight of it made Stephen just a little… No. He didn’t want to get into that.

For his part, Herbert didn’t seem to be in on whatever it was that made his old acquaintance (friend?) look at him like they shared some sort of secret. “No. I don’t have any reason to pay attention to whether there are children’s toys in the general store, as I am neither a child—“ his voice had grown rather sharp “—nor in need of a gift to give a child.”

The look Miss Watson shot him at this was still a knowing one, but in a different way: tired, this time. “That wasn’t a shot at your height.” Though her tone of voice was more exasperated than tired. “He’s got a couple of Ouija boards in there, you know.”

“Does he? Didn’t you have one when you were a child?”

She smirked. “Thought you’d remember. It’d be kind of hard not to, considering what we did to poor—“ she did not sound especially contrite “—Francis back in, you know, I don’t remember if it was ’92 or ’93.”

A small sound escaped Herbert’s mouth that could have been a laugh, though it was accompanied by a grimace. “Hmm, yes. For a boy who claimed not to be scared of anything, it did not take much to send Morgan running screaming.”

“Yeah, telling him it was Keziah Mason he was talking to might have been a bit much.”

“Wait—“ Stephen looked from Herbert to Miss Watson, back to Herbert, eyebrows shooting higher all the while. “Morgan? Francis Morgan, from school?”

By the time they had entered their final year of medical school, there were precious few people willing to speak with Herbert if they did not have to. Even fewer were willing to take the time to make his acquaintance, or cultivate his friendship. Francis Morgan entered the medical school the same year that Herbert and Stephen were entering their final, and Morgan made himself distinctive by doing just what so few others were willing to attempt. For a while, anyways.

For around a month and a half, Stephen stewed in jealousy, absolutely miserable because he was excruciatingly aware of _why_ he was so jealous. Morgan was strikingly intelligent and not at all bad-looking, with glossy black hair, clear gray eyes, and strong, regular features. That Herbert actually seemed something resembling receptive of Morgan’s attempts to befriend him had made Stephen even more miserable, which made him sick with guilt ( _as far as Stephen knew, he had been Herbert’s one and only friend at the time; though he never gave voice to it, Stephen knew there was some part of Herbert that must have been_ lonely _, and yet he couldn’t muster the slightest bit of happiness to see someone else treat him favorably_ ), which succeeded only in making him even more miserable.

But then, all of a sudden, Morgan’s overtures stopped, and he became just another hazy figure at the edge of a shrinking world. Stephen wasn’t certain what it was. He _was_ certain Herbert hadn’t scared him off, at least not deliberately; he was subdued, bordering on melancholy, for nearly a fortnight following Morgan’s desertion (If it could really be called such). It had not been down to anything Stephen had done; there was precious little he could say for his behavior during this time period, but he could at least say that he had not done anything designed to scare Morgan off.

Maybe Herbert had tried to introduce Morgan to his theories (though they weren’t just theories anymore, not at that point), and it had gone poorly. Maybe Morgan had finally been swayed by all the rumors that swirled around Herbert, decided he didn’t want to be associated too closely with a man regarded as one of the local crackpots, and dropped him. It didn’t matter, in the end. Stephen had no real desire to confront Morgan over it, and if Herbert had had any such confrontation, he hadn’t conducted it in public.

“This is a private conversation,” Miss Watson snapped.

Herbert regarded him steadily. “I’ll be just a few minutes more. Didn’t you say you had things to do in town?”

“…Alright.”

If Stephen ever encountered someone who was capable of picking his brain and reading his thoughts, they might ask him why Herbert’s apparent longstanding acquaintance with Elsa Watson did not send him into the paroxysms of jealousy that his equally apparent longstanding acquaintance with Francis Morgan had. Stephen would have said that the odd, nearly hostile look that passed between them as he left had something to do with it.

-0-0-0-

“I’d appreciate it if you didn’t take that tone with him,” Herbert said coolly, once the door had shut and Stephen was out in the street, frowning at Elsie in displeasure.

Elsie never had cared much for his displeasure. “This _is_ a private conversation,” she pointed out. “Didn’t think you’d want him running for the hills if he hears something he can’t handle.” She looked meaningfully over at Stephen, who’d taken a post outside one of the windows; not looking into the pharmacy—he was subtler than all that—but clearly waiting. “How much does Doctor Harper know about the things that go on around here?”

For the most part, that… was a very good question. And not one Herbert really knew the answer to, not in great detail. “He knows a little more _now_ ,” Herbert conceded in a mutter, biting back a bitter sigh.

Elsie’s round face was contorted slightly in a rueful grimace. “Did your trip to Kingsport go that badly?”

“It could have gone better.”

Herbert would have kept him from it, if he could. He knew how certain people would take his experiments, but he really wasn’t a cruel man—didn’t like to think of himself as such—and had had no desire to expose Stephen to, as Elsie put it, the sort of things that went on in the Miskatonic Valley. It could be difficult enough for people who had lived here all their lives to contend with it; someone who was a relative newcomer as an adult would be forgiven for being completely unable to cope with it.

(He didn’t want Stephen ‘running for the hills,’ didn’t want him to leave, found the thought so unbearable that he could barely edge around it, let alone address it directly. The idea of being left alone was beyond endurance.)

It had been useless to try to keep Stephen from it. This was the Miskatonic Valley. It was impossible to live here and not be exposed to it, not learn at least a little about it. It was highly difficult not to learn a lot about it, learn more than what was good for you, and then suffer every last ill consequence of knowing too much. Herbert had spent a good portion of his life trying to determine where the boundaries were, poking, sometimes less cautiously than he ought, at the boundaries of what constituted safe knowledge. He knew the danger of it, and he knew the futility of trying to avoid it.

He let his eyes stray briefly to the window. Stephen stood there still, back turned, waiting. Herbert’s heart swelled with searing, lacerating warmth, and in that moment, he chose to trust. It was, in the end, all he could really do—though it felt thoroughly inadequate.

Elsie sighed and drummed her fingers on the countertop. “It’s such a pretty town,” she muttered. “You’d think it’d be a little friendlier. But no.” She shook her head. “Anyways, that’s not what I’m talking about. You had to go through Arkham to get to Kingsport, didn’t you?”

Herbert quirked an eyebrow. “Well, yes. Arkham has the only rail line into Kingsport. This wasn’t a pleasure trip; we needed to get there and back fairly quickly.”

“That’s right,” Elsie muttered, more to herself than to him. Her face a little tight, she asked, “I don’t suppose you saw either of the Mullins twins while you were there?”

It took Herbert a little while to connect the name to two faces, and when he did, he saw the two little girls they had been, not the women they had grown to be. “Lois and Olive? I can’t say that I have.” Not that he would have had much opportunity to seek them out, given that the damned bus could never abide by its own schedule and arrive at its stops on time.

Her shoulders drew up a little bit, gaze drifting. “Okay. Guess I’m going to have go looking for them myself the next time I’m in Arkham.” Then, abruptly, her gaze snapped back to Herbert’s face, and she clarified, “I haven’t heard from either of them in a while. No replies to my letters, and I don’t think they’ve moved out of town.” She sighed heavily. “I really hope nothing’s happened to them.”

“If they’re still working in their mother’s shop, I doubt they have much _time_ to be writing letters,” Herbert pointed out. He wanted to believe that, at least enough that his mind didn’t start to turn to the topic of certain other things that could have happened to the Mullins twins.

“I suppose.” Elsie looked past him to the window, and stilled. Then, she tilted her head bemusedly. “Your friend’s picked up a new hobby?”

Herbert knew what he was going to see, even before he turned round. And yet, when he saw it, he let out a sigh that, in volume and perplexed exasperation, was more like a groan.

It was confusing enough that Stephen would want to take photographs of their house, either the exterior or the interior. Really, the house was not that nice-looking, and was far from the sort of thing most people would consider being worth the effort of photographic preservation. Bolton proper was not much more aesthetically pleasing. The town had been constructed swiftly and shoddily, springing up with desperate speed to accommodate the people pouring into the area to work at the new mill that had been built in relative wilderness. (Sometimes, Herbert wondered if that was really the way the building of a mill was supposed to work. He could be wrong, but he suspected it wasn’t.) Nothing anywhere in the town had been built with aesthetics in mind. There was not a single building in Bolton that Herbert would admit to finding even remotely pretty.

Stephen had likely seen prettier. He had come of age in a city where it could be attested that a great deal of care had gone into at least part of its construction. Why Bolton would be anything worth documenting in his eyes was beyond Herbert, and yet…

About the only thing on the row of shows Stephen had the camera aimed at that would have been worth photographing was the sign over the tavern. Some creative soul had gone to the trouble of punching holes in the metal sign, clearly meant as a facsimile of bullet holes—though Herbert sometimes entertained visions of that creative soul taking a recently-finished sign out into the woods and actually firing a gun at it. Stephen was rather obviously not taking photographs of that hole-ridden sign.

“Do you want to know what I’m afraid of?” This didn’t even scratch the surface of what Herbert was afraid of, but he had learned early on the power of a good decoy. “I’m afraid that someone who hasn’t seen him before is going to think he’s a tourist, rob him, and leave his bruised and bleeding body in an alley somewhere. Or face down in a creek.”

“Don’t be silly. Bolton’s not nearly big enough for that; everybody already knows who he is.”

“I note you’re not disputing the part about a mugging.”

Elsie shrugged. “Wellll… It’s a Brownie, that camera, isn’t it? There’re Brownies everywhere; unless he’s etched his name into the side or something, if you take it from him, there’d be no way to really tell it was his. You probably wouldn’t have a hard time fencing it; I know a lot of the brats running around the mill village would love something like that.”

And Herbert had paid enough visits to that bleak collection of tiny houses—some of them barely any larger than his room back at the Caldwell’s house—to understand why the children who lived there might be desperate for a distraction. All the same, Herbert had no desire to expose Stephen to the parents of those children, if they ever grew _that_ desperate to put a smile on their child’s face. “I’ll tell him to keep it up in his room when we have patients over, then.”

“You do that; they’ve already seen him with it, but you do that.” Her mouth quirked in a lopsided not-quite smile. “So, how long has this been going on?”

“Since a few days after we got back from Kingsport.” Herbert could hardly begrudge Stephen the camera itself, not when it was probably the only positive thing to have come of their visit there. But this was just so far from what was sensible; he would have though Stephen had been living in the area long enough to understand the folly of drawing attention to yourself needlessly.

Elsie looked something close to alarmed, staring out of the window with her mouth agape. “He got it in _Kingsport_? Are you sure it isn’t…” She couldn’t seem to find the words to describe what she was getting at. The way she wiggled her fingers, though, got her point across pretty clearly.

“It’s a normal camera, Miss Watson.” And Herbert would never, ever admit that he had wondered about that for a moment, himself.

“Rightttt…” Her eyebrows shot up. “He’s just turned into a camera fiend of his own accord, then?”

“So it would seem,” Herbert let out on a hard, hot exhale. “But he should be running out of film quite soon, so at least there’s that.”

The hiccup of a laugh that escaped Elsie’s mouth put a bit of a damper on his optimism. Her sing-song tone as she asked, “Are you sure?” did not help.

“Why…” This was not constructive, not constructive at all. “Why shouldn’t I be?”

Elsie’s mouth curved in a slow, toothy smile. “Because Urquhart sells Kodak film in his store.”

It took a moment for the information to sink in. Once it did, all Herbert could do was scrub at his forehead with his hand, trying to ward off the sudden onset of a headache, and try to restrain the urge to kick something. “Oh, _Christ_ , of course he does. Can’t be bothered to stock the disinfectant we need on a regular basis, but camera film is just an _essential_ item.” Then, something else occurred to him. “Does he even sell cameras there?”

“Nope!” Elsie replied cheerfully. “I haven’t seen a camera in there in over a year.”

“ _God_. How is that store still open?”

“That’d be because the train to Arkham isn’t up yet. Once people can get there more easily, I wouldn’t lay odds on Urquhart lasting more than about eight months,” she said sagely. “Not unless he really cleans up his act in a hurry.”

“That is of little consolation to me _now_.” Herbert drew back from the counter, plucking up the little bag of headache medicine he had come in here to buy. “I’ll be seeing you.”

Elsie sighed, waving him off. “Sure, just leave me here with nothing to do but take inventory over and over again.” There was little heat in her voice, just the tiredness of a woman who knew she was about to return to complete and total monotony.

That might have been the end of it, but near the door, Herbert halted. Momentarily, he made an attempt to reach for the door, but his hand fell back to his side. He looked behind him. “…Elsie?”

“Ha!” The look on her face as she put her hands on her hips was something caught between amusement and almost-offense. “Am I ‘Elsie’ again, Doctor ‘We’re not children, anymore?’”

Herbert ignored that; he couldn’t find the fire required for a retort. “How are things going with that soda fountain?” he asked, pointing towards the device in question.

She blinked a few times; not the response she had been expecting, clearly. “It’s… It’s good.” She glanced over at the fountain, which was looking slightly less glossy than it had a few months back, when it was freshly-installed. “It’s a novelty. People like novelty.”

“And…” Herbert paused. The words were hard to pin down. “…What happens when the novelty wears off?”

Elsie shrugged, looking suddenly uncomfortable. “Some people will keep drinking it, because they liked it all along. And others will stop, because it was the novelty they liked, not the soda, and it’s not…” She shrugged again, helplessly. “…It’s not novel, anymore.”

“I see.” That was about the size of it. “Well, goodbye.”


	6. Chapter Six

May Day had come and gone a long while back, but any celebration being planned in sultry heat, even if it was only the stockpiling of fireworks and the erection of a makeshift, rather puny stage from which to fire them, had the power to put Herbert on edge. He liked to imagine that he was better at hiding his nerves now than he had been in childhood or adolescence, though every time he told himself he could hide them completely, something bled out, so maybe not. No one looked at him like they thought he was one loud, sudden noise away from a nervous collapse, so there was that, at least.

There was a price to pay for hiding his nerves under the sun; for everything that ever existed under the sun, there was a price that must inevitably be extracted. The price found Herbert under moonlight.

He was familiar with it. They weren’t his normal dreams, and he knew them the moment he woke from them.

He knew he was far from alone in being familiar with it—Arkham was a town plagued with nightmares.

It did not make it easier to bear.

He couldn’t even remember most of what happened in the dreams. That was what made it so ridiculous that he would be affected by them at all. All he had of them were the phantasmagoric suggestions of a mind untethered by the waking world—movement on the edge of vision, sounds whose quality and exact timbre Herbert forgot within moments of waking, the sensation of being followed. Just the faintest suggestions, magnified by the state he found himself in upon waking. Just the faintest suggestions, and he would jerk awake in bed, heart pounding, pulse roaring so loudly in his ears that he could hear naught but that entirely internal river of blood, and gripped by a choking terror not at all helped by the blurred, distorted sea of shadow the world became without his spectacles. Just a moment, a terrible moment, when he couldn’t remember where he was, and nothing was as it ought to be.

And here was the thing that stayed, long after he was fully awake, long after those half-remembered memories of the dream had flown apart into choking stardust, the thing that would stay until sunrise: the world was wrong. The world had changed while he slept, it was wrong, he didn’t know where the wrongness could be found or how it was to be distinguished from what it should be, but he knew it was wrong, he _knew_ it.

The only reason Herbert ever kept his curtains open at night was because his bedroom was on the second floor of the house. He _knew_ it was on the second floor of the house, knew it was impossible for someone to look into his window without the aid of a ladder, and that he would certainly have woken up if a ladder had thudded against the exterior wall of his house. Logically, he knew all of these things, and he knew that his panic after waking from a nightmare would be all the worse if there was absolutely no light in the room when he woke. All of these things did absolutely nothing to stop him from having that moment, upon waking from a nightmare, of being absolutely convinced that there was someone staring in at him through that uncovered window.

It was just a moment. Just a moment for him to throw the sheets off of his body (well, on nights when it was actually cool enough for him to sleep under the sheets, and tonight did _not_ qualify), look to the window, and for the evidence provided by his eyes to support all logic. Just a moment for him to see that his window looked out on empty sky, all waxing moon and thin, filmy cloud banks and stars that glittered distantly beautiful and uncaring.

Herbert lied awake in the dark, sheets long ago kicked to the foot of the bed, and struggled without success to throw off this feeling of wrongness. It was foolish. He felt foolish. That did not help.

And what his desperation was driving him to do now did not help that feeling of foolishness. _You’d think I_ hadn’t _spent most of my life sleeping alone_ , he thought to himself as he got out of bed, rolling his stiff shoulders. By the time his grandparents had died, it had been years since he had last bothered them after a nightmare, and he had kept his fear to himself well enough after that, hiding it from whichever family member had custody of him at the time, and later, from his landlords and fellow boarders.

But desperation propelled him forward more powerfully than any feeling of foolishness pushed him back. It was with a mix of relief and frustration verging on anxiety that he found Stephen’s bedroom door unlocked—he was never worried about what might come calling at night, about what might find this unlocked door and regard it the way a fox regarded the open door to a henhouse.

The hinges were old, and when Herbert and Stephen were in the process of making this house something that could be truly lived in, doors that could actually shut and be locked properly had been ignored in favor of those that couldn’t, so neither Herbert nor Stephen had ever thought to buy oil for the hinges, let alone those of this particular door. The sound the door made as Herbert gingerly pushed it open was not a sound commonly heard outside of the fevered imaginations of horror novelists. But Stephen, deep sleeper, at least when it came to sounds, did not stir.

Here, the curtains were drawn half-closed, and the room was lit by a strip of luminescent silver light that swirled and rippled like the reflection of moonlight on water. It was enough, just enough, for Herbert to make out that Stephen hadn’t even bothered kicking the bedclothes to the foot of the bed, and instead simply lied on top of them. That, he thought, as he laid his spectacles down on the dresser, would make things easier.

Stephen was a deep sleeper when it came to sounds, but he was not quite so deep a sleeper when it came to movement, and not long after Herbert first settled his weight on the mattress, he heard a faint, sleepy, “Herbert? What are you doing?”

It was a valid question, for all that it stung. In the winter, the vicious, biting cold (and, for all too many days, the lack of a working furnace), had driven them both into Stephen’s bed almost every night; the only times they had slept apart at a stretch was when first Herbert, and much later, Stephen, had fallen ill. But in summer, the weather served on many nights to drive them each to separate beds—when looking for a cool draught, a warm body next to you was more likely to be a hindrance than a help.

Herbert leaned over him. He felt, suddenly, as if his flesh had turned to glass, a feeling not helped when he moved into the narrow strip of light—his hand on Stephen’s chest was turned to sickly silver porcelain, and staring at it too long gave the impression of glassy translucency, like the flesh of a frog or a glass figurine whose paint was starting to fade away. Herbert dipped his head down into the dark and kissed him, tasting salt on his lips. “Don’t leave,” he said.

Stephen’s head sat in a sea of dark too dense for Herbert to make out his expression. “This is my bed,” he told him drowsily in response. He slid his hand slowly up Herbert’s back, his large palm pressing against Herbert’s spine.

There were so many things clamoring on Herbert’s tongue, so many things wrapping around his heart like strangling vines. His mouth ached. His throat screamed. He felt like his heart would pop, like a balloon filled with too much blood.

“Don’t leave,” he said, with the brittle monotone of a scratched record.

Another hand settled on Herbert’s back, and then Stephen was pulling him down onto his chest. The right hand skated up to cradle the back of Herbert’s head, fingers moving slowly through his hair as Stephen found his mouth.

They lied there like that for what, in the still, silent night, could have been a moment or an eternity. Time didn’t matter in the dark; time wasn’t real in the dark. Herbert felt his heartbeat slow, and he sighed softly as he rested his forehead on Stephen’s shoulder. He could feel pulses under his skin, and couldn’t tell where the flow of his blood ended, and Stephen’s began. He could hear two slow, even sets of breathing, and could not tell which was which. In the dark, he found find a sense of intimacy more complete than when their bodies were light by sun or lamp, and the boundaries and edges were more clearly demarcated. (He did not turn his gaze back to that sickly moonlight.)

In the blind dark, it was easy to lose all sense of yourself. But when you lost it with someone else, when you lost yourself in someone else’s arms, you could imagine a union more complete than the kind sanctioned by a pastor or a priest. It was soothing.

“Alright,” Stephen murmured, lips rasping against Herbert’s ears. “You’re heavy.”

Herbert could say a few things about what it felt like when Stephen put too much of his weight on _him_. He didn’t want to say it. It was the only thing he could think to say. Better to strip his tongue of speech than say it.

He lied down on his side, facing the door, let out a quiet breath when he felt arms snake over his chest and draw him back, ever so slightly.

It was a long time before sleep found him again.

-0-0-0-

There were a few hours when it was thought that the fireworks display planned for Bolton would be rained out. Independence Day had dawned markedly overcast, the sky a bed of deep gray clouds. Thunder could be heard from south and east, closer to the coast, but there that thunder stayed, never making the journey up to Bolton. No wind to disturb the damp walls of heat, no rain to dispel them.

Of course, people who wanted to see the fireworks would be happy for that. Those who wanted some relief from the sweltering heat were left without even the slightest reprieve.

Herbert saw Stephen out the door a little after seven that evening, camera in hand, of course—though Herbert doubted Stephen would be able to get any photographs of the fireworks worth keeping. Besides the fact that they’d all be blurry, Herbert was quite certain that none of the rolls of film Stephen had bought in Kingsport were color—they’d have been much more expensive if they were—and Urquhart’s inconsistencies aside, Herbert somehow doubted he sold color film in his store. Hope sprang eternal, though, and Stephen couldn’t be persuaded to leave the camera at home.

Well, one could only hope he wasn’t mugged in whatever crowd the firework display might attract.

(It might be a fairly large crowd, honestly. Bolton presented its occupants with little in the way of diversions, and there were a number of farms and clusters of small houses that couldn’t quite be counted as towns, villages, or even hamlets scattered about the area, in between the swathes of barely-touched wilderness. For all that it was smaller than Arkham, Herbert could think of a few reasons why these people might prefer to travel to Bolton, instead.)

Herbert’s bedroom window looked out towards town, and his attempts to read were regularly interrupted with bursts of color and the sharp pops that never failed to make him start, no matter how many times they reached his ears. Someone had to stay home, if for no other reason than because if there was a drunken stabbing during the festivities, the people involved would probably want to come somewhere remote to have the stabbed man treated, and come to someone who was both willing to treat them and keep their mouth shut regarding the treatment. Someone had to stay home, and you would _think_ that the person who was staying home would at least be able to find something _other_ than the fireworks to occupy his attention.

You would think that.

The fact that he could hear the pops of the fireworks going off all the way out here, with his window closed, begged otherwise.

And eventually, there was nothing for Herbert to do but slam his book shut and slap it down on the mattress of his bed, and turn his attention to the window.

He didn’t much care for fireworks, honestly. The bursts of color had some potential in terms of beauty, but the noise was thoroughly unwelcome, as was the way they disrupted the night. There were, at least, no stars or moon to be tainted by those short-lived flowers of sparkling blue and red and yellow light, thanks to the bed of clouds that hid the sky. But it still seemed utterly gauche to try to paint the night in such garish colors. The night was something older and more powerful than that, to ever be truly affected by any effort of man to mitigate its quiet, unseen power. Or so life had led Herbert to believe.

Of course, if he looked hard enough into the old, slightly warped glass of his window, he wouldn’t really have to look at fireworks after a while. After a while, his reflection in the glass became so clear that the fireworks were barely visible beyond.

Herbert could think of other things he could have been doing tonight. Oh, the mill hadn’t had any deaths in a while, and truly, he was glad of that. The way the lumbering beasts that place called its machinery killed people typically left their victims far too mangled to be of any use on the lab table. And besides, Herbert may never have worked in a mill himself, but he had eyes, and he had an imagination. He could imagine, all too easily, just how agonizing a death at the hands of the machinery could be, likely always _was_. He did not wish that on anyone; when people died, no matter what they had done in the lead-up to that final moment, they deserved a quicker death than that.

But imagine if someone had died earlier today. Virtually everyone in town was gathered around the little stage they set up for the display; Herbert had it from one of the patrolmen that nearly every single police officer in Bolton was stationed close to the festivities tonight, and only the barest skeleton force was going to be out on their normal nightly patrols. The heat could bake even freshly turned earth dry and hard within hours, but as far as nights went, Herbert thought only Christmas Eve would match this one for how little chance they had of being intercepted going to or from the potter’s field.

How could they ever make any progress with the reagent when they had so few opportunities even to _try_? How were they ever supposed to—

_Click!_

It was probably a good thing it wasn’t possible for someone to literally jump out of their skin.

Herbert turned a sharp, hard glare towards the open doorway of his bedroom. Not without some measure of discomfiture did he wonder how preoccupied he had to have been not to have heard Stephen come home; the front door opening and shutting alone was loud enough that it ought to have alerted him, let alone the creak of the stairs as they were trod upon.

“I know,” Stephen said, before Herbert could say anything at all. He held up a hand, offered an apologetic smile. “You’re not a model. I only had one left on this roll of film; I just wanted to use it and be done with it.”

Herbert could think of little to say to that that wasn’t something that, even past the sudden surge of anger heating his chest, he could recognize as being entirely disproportionate to the situation. He was being foolish. It was just a camera. Turning away from Stephen in a huff and returning to his post staring out of the window was foolish, too, and yet he was doing it, and drawing his knees up close to his chest like he was a child again. It was all he could do not to sink his fingernails into the wool of his trousers.

He wasn’t entirely certain what he expected from Stephen. Maybe for him to just turn around and head towards his own room, for him to speak again, but stay in the doorway as he did so. Herbert wasn’t thinking terribly hard about his expectations, devoting more attention to swallowing on his temper before it choked him

He wasn’t thinking about it at all, and thus he found himself jumping a little again when he felt the mattress sink under Stephen’s weight. Herbert did not turn his head round, and thus watched Stephen’s hazy reflection in the mirror as the latter reached forward, rested a hand on Herbert’s tense arm.

“Teach you to sneak into my bed,” Stephen murmured, but Herbert could hear the snatches of humor clinging to the edges of his words, and the softness that did not need to cling, for it was the primary component.

Herbert made no response. The sudden contact made him shake.

Stephen sighed, making a tsking noise that happened to coincide with the hiss of a sulfur-yellow firework being shot off miles from their house (God, the noise carried so far). “What’s the matter?” He stroked Herbert’s arm gently, elbow to shoulder and back down again. “Why don’t you tell me?”

Finally, Herbert found the capacity for speech that wouldn’t completely mortify. “Why mess around with the camera so much?” he grumbled.

“Why shouldn’t I? There’s not much to _do_ around here; I have to have my fun somehow.”

“And _that_ , by you, is _fun_?”

“As I just pointed out, I’m not spoiled for choice here. I’ll take my diversions where I can find them.”

“I fail to understand what is diverting about photographing this—“ Herbert gesticulated at the room with his right arm; he was still staring determinedly out of the window, and thus had only a vague idea of where exactly he had pointed “—house. Or me, for that matter,” he muttered. “The house is nothing attractive enough to warrant memorializing; it’s just a waste of film.”

When Herbert felt a warm hand slide against his cheek, he leaned into it ever so slightly, without thinking. His eyes fluttered shut for a moment, before he remembered himself, and opened them again.

“Do you want to know why?” When Herbert gave no response, Stephen turned his head gently away from the window. The eyes he met were firm. “Really why?”

After a moment, “That has been the whole point of this conversation.”

Stephen ducked his head to huff a laugh. He sobered quickly. “Yes, it has been. Though you seem determined to turn it in to an argument. Herbert, do you know why people take photographs in the first place?”

Herbert wrinkled his nose. “I have not been raised away from civilization, thank you. People take photographs of what they wish to preserve.”

But judging from the way he shook his head, it looked as if Stephen thought he was missing something. “And to document what they have since left behind,” he added in a lower voice. “Which brings me back to us. Herbert, if I’ve been taking so many photos of the house—and Bolton—lately, it’s because one day I want to look at those photos as being photos of the place I _used_ to live in.”

“I—“ Herbert’s stomach turned so fast he thought he might throw up. “What—“

Stephen slid his hand a little further back, forefinger curled behind Herbert’s ear. “We can’t…” He faltered, licking his lips. A shadow of the near-wild fear Herbert had seen in his face in Kingsport flashed in his eyes, before he managed to suppress it. “We can’t stay here forever,” he mumbled. “We just can’t.” He rallied enough to go on, “And even if this blasted valley was without its—“ his mouth quirked in an expression half-grimace, half-smirk “—special problems, I cannot believe you would wish to stay in a tiny little mill town for the rest of your life. Not you.”

It was a long time before Herbert could respond. “…I don’t.” And then, it was as if he had managed to get past an obstruction in his throat, and the words came out in a quick, high-pitched stream. “It was never my intent for us to stay here forever.” He was relieved to put Arkham behind him. He would like to put a bit more _distance_ between Arkham and himself. “I don’t think it would be _possible_ for us to stay here forever; we’ve evaded detection thus far—it certainly doesn’t hurt that so many of the men working in the mill came to the country without their families—but I can’t believe we’ll be able to go on forever without someone starting to suspect _something_.”

Herbert was not a particularly attentive observer of the evolution of mill towns, but he could guess at the general pattern. Unless something truly catastrophic happened to the Bolton Worsted Mills, it would likely grow larger as time wore on. It would employ more people, so that it could produce textiles to its fullest capacity, and inevitably, Bolton would grow. In another ten, maybe fifteen years, Bolton would rival, or maybe even surpass, Arkham in size; Herbert really did not think Arkham was going to experience a population boom any time soon. As Bolton grew in size, their home would inevitably be less remote. They might even have something in the way of neighbors.

When they were the only people living this far out on Pond Street, it was relatively easy to evade detection. And perhaps, if they were just two people living in the midst of a very large town or city, it would be easy to evade detection, for those around them would have so many other things to focus on that Herbert and Stephen might just fade into the background. But in a situation where they had a few neighbors, just a few, and these neighbors did not have anything sufficiently diverting to keep them from staring out of their windows at night, that was where the two of them seemed likely to run into problems. At least, Herbert thought so. He had yet to have any experience that would prove him right or wrong.

“But we aren’t ready to leave, not now.”

Herbert said the words in every expectation that he would have to convince Stephen of them, and it was with some relief that he watched him nod instead.

“Yeah, I _know_ that, Herbert. Two doctors barely a year out of medical school aren’t going to do so well competing against every established doctor in Boston. Or New York City. Or Providence. Or Chicago.” He sighed, letting the hand he had on Herbert’s face fall to his shoulder. “Or any large city, honestly. And we certainly can’t afford to _live_ in any of those places yet. We can barely afford to live here.” He leaned a little closer. “But we can’t stay here,” he said softly. “Not here. There’s nothing here for us, nothing but—“ he gave a choked little chuckle “—nothing but corpses. And they won’t keep us fed. They won’t make our living a comfortable one. I don’t want that for you,” he murmured, favoring Herbert with an odd little smile.

Suddenly feeling more than a little giddy, Herbert laughed (more high-pitched than he would have liked) and said lightly, “Well, when we have the reputation to carry it off, I’ll be more than happy to watch those other doctors’ faces as we chip away at their patient lists. God knows I long for the day when all of our patients can actually afford to pay their bills on time, and we don’t have our hands full with children insisting we pull leeches off of them.” Stephen’s mouth twitched, and Herbert pressed on, “Do you _know_ how many leeches I’ve been pulling off of small children this past week alone? Good lord, if we were doing all of this fifty years ago, we could get rich selling them to the nearest hospital. We wouldn’t have to worry about whether our patients paid their bills; we wouldn’t have to worry about whether or not we had that many patients at _all_ , so long as the little leech farms kept coming.”

Needless to say, such a sentiment would not have gone over particularly well with the parents of these children. Oh, well. Herbert had never claimed to be particularly fond of small children, as a rule.

Stephen laughed loudly, a sound that cut through the thick, humid silence of the house like a shot. He swayed forward to press his lips to Herbert’s brow, and Herbert finally let the tension out of his shoulders, leaning against him with a quiet sigh.

At the screech of a distant firework, he jumped.

“I don’t know what makes the idiots think they can hold back the night forever,” Herbert muttered, tilting his head forwards as Stephen looped his arm around his shoulders.

“What was it you said, when we first started to work together?” Stephen murmured into his hair in response. “That you wanted to shine a light into the dark?”

That wasn’t exactly what he had said. It had been years ago, now, but he could remember it so clearly. The rush of weak-kneed elation at a simple _‘I’ll help you. I want to help you’_ and the realization that it was meant, that it wasn’t a lie or a joke, was not something he would forget any time soon.

_“In the pursuit of knowledge, I have faced down the darkness of ignorance. Such is the same as anyone who has ever pursued knowledge where preexisting knowledge is scarce. If I can only shine a light into the dark, I would be happy; I am not so ignorant as to believe I could banish it all within my own lifetime.”_

“I was speaking in metaphor,” Herbert reminded him, “and literal darkness is not something humanity can ever prevail against, not permanently. The more we try, the less we remember how to contend with it at all.”

“But it’s still worth it when we try. And it’s not an unworthy aim, to try to banish terror from the world.”

And yet, still futile. But, Herbert thought, as he turned his gaze toward the window, the bursts of color were beautiful. However short-lived they might be, they were beautiful.


End file.
